“What is Data Mining” Article Shows What We Knew About the NSA Before Snowden, but Chose to Ignore
Dallas, TX (PRWEB) July 02, 2013 -- In a bid to show just how much was known about NSA activity before the recent Edward Snowden controversy, idcloak has republished its January 2013 article What Is Data Mining, What Is NSA'S Utah Data Center, And What Data Collection Methods Are Being Used There? The article points to a list of past NSA whistleblowers, such as Thomas Drake, Russ Tice, Thomas Tamm, Mark Klein and William Binney – many of whom suffered personal and legal harassment as a result of their allegations against the agency.
“It is interesting to see just how many of Snowden’s revelations have already been voiced before,” says idcloak’s lead privacy researcher, Terence Shull. “No one was listening back then. But they are now.”
Clear parallels can be drawn between Edward Snowden and the accounts of William Binney, who quit his job after seeing how the cyber surveillance system he himself created had been misapplied by the NSA to facilitate surveillance that, in his words, was “Orwellian.” He estimated 20 trillion communications, including phone calls, had been intercepted by the NSA before the year 2012.
Other sources in the article are unnamed, such as a senior intelligence official who provided some of the only information known about NSA’s data-storage behemoth, known as the Utah Data Center. “This government facility is the first in the world to have a capacity of more than one yottabyte. Nothing else in the world reaches even a thousandth that size,” says Shull. “Central to the facility’s function is its ability to decrypt protected communication including secure server email. Whether or not Google SSL decryption keys are handed over by the corporation, NSA will use in-house technologies to see what’s being searched by targeted users. It’s fascinating that this stuff has been ignored until now. Perhaps it’s because Snowden was the first of his whistleblowing peers to publish hard evidence, or perhaps it just took a while for the public to really care.”
idcloak is a provider of information and services that protect the identity, data and freedoms of internet users. For more information, visit http://www.idcloak.com,
Written by Gill-Chris Welles.
Gill-Chris Welles, idcloak Technologies Inc., http://www.idcloak.com, 786-210-9230, [email protected]
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