Now that the US government is recording all your electronic communications...

[barts]

If not now, within a few months or a year or two, the United States government will be intercepting every American's electronic communications. This will be done without warrant.

Now that Americans have no privacy from government scrutiny when it comes to telephone calls, emails, even postings to sites like Volconvo, how do you intend to (or do you intend to) alter your communications habits? Or perhaps you approve of this warrant-less government spying on citizens and residents.

[sulh-i-kul]

They can't intercept encrypted traffic (or even all unencrypted traffic).
It would be more than naive to believe they weren't intercepting a lot of unencrypted traffic before.

I've discussed the issue with naive folks but none so naive as to believe emails, telephone calls or forum posts were somehow automatically secure.
Spying is trivial. As you well know, it's a routine undertaking not only of your government but of non-state actors as well as foreign governments.
The ancients already encrypted confidential information.

[Jack]

The biggest problem with electronic intelligence gathering isn't collecting it, it's analyzing it to make it useful. NSA has had this problem for decades. Even in the '70s more SIGINT (Signal Intelligence, which at the time included all electronic intercepts) was collected than could be properly analyzed. It was well into the '80s before much of what was intercepted in the '70s was looked at and listened to. At that time the charter prohibited storing any conversation in which one end of the communication was in the U.S. Calls from the Soviet Union to the U.S. could be listened to and the part of the call originating in the USSR could be stored, but the U.S. half of the call had to be deleted. I understand the Bush and Obama administrations have effectively removed that prohibition.

That only will serve to increase the volume of intercepted traffic without solving the analysis issue. The agency has attempted to implement keyword scanning to cut down on the time interval from intercept to analysis, but keywords are a sloppy and usually futile means of finding useful intelligence. I'm not in favor of unfettered intelligence gathering from domestic sources, but the reality is that criminals and foreign enemies use the Internet and agencies like the FBI and NSA would be remiss if they didn't monitor Internet communications. I'd rather see those agencies find ways to deny Internet access to those who abuse it, but that's about as unrealistic as thinking that they're going to gather much useful intelligence from monitoring Facebook and Google search.

I'm a bit conflicted on this topic. I accept that intelligence must be gathered to enable our country to survive in the international community of nations. I also think it's a real shame that the Internet has been compromised by both our enemies and our intelligence agencies. But it happened with the telephone and it's naive to think the Internet would be spared. Encryption isn't much of a barrier since all but a very few encryption algorithms have backdoors built into them at the demand of the NSA. Besides, when it comes to breaking codes, NSA has the best and brightest minds employed at Ft. Meade.

Personally I'm not concerned. I'm fully aware that any of my communications may at any time be monitored by the NSA. It was acknowledged in the documents I had to sign when I was discharged from the Army Security Agency. There's nothing I say or do, especially on the Internet, I don't realize may be recorded and analyzed, most likely ten years from now.

[sulh-i-kul]

Encryption isn't much of a barrier since all but a very few encryption algorithms have backdoors built into them at the demand of the NSA.

That's a totally preposterous claim. And immaterial to boot (how many algorithms do you need?). Coming from you, that was unexpected.

Besides, when it comes to breaking codes, NSA has the best and brightest minds employed at Ft. Meade.

It takes more than bright minds to crack decent encryption. Aera 51 stuff. Who's to say what they've got, right? But realistically...

[Dieval]

As jack pointed out, there's no way to analyze all of the data that they would collect, let along store it for any period of time.

[Yarn]

Only because of the scope. The general rule of thumb I hear from IT professionals is that nothing is safe if the attacker has enough time and resources. Hence, the government couldn't hack everyone at once, but it could hack any specific person.

In the hands of a government like China's, this would be bone chilling because it would use this power to crack down on political dissent. What you think of this in the US largely has to do with how much you trust our government.

[Apeman81]

I'm sure that out of the billions of phone calls and emails and texts every week, they'll get around to mine someday

[Yarn]

Probably only if you do something suspicious.

[seyorni]

They've been doing this for years. Even the mainstream media has reported it. All electronic communications is already intercepted.

Obviously they can't actually read all our communications, much less analyze them. They have automated algorithms that sift everything for significance.

Of course, keeping in mind how effectively they acted on the abundant red flags preceding the 9/11 debacle, I have my doubts about their competence to handle the much greater volume of intelligence they're inundated with today.

[Yarn]

More traffic, more resources, more experience.

[Jack]

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)

It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world’s billions of public web pages. The NSA is more interested in the so-called invisible web, also known as the deep web or deepnet—data beyond the reach of the public. This includes password-protected data, US and foreign government communications, and noncommercial file-sharing between trusted peers. “The deep web contains government reports, databases, and other sources of information of high value to DOD and the intelligence community,” according to a 2010 Defense Science Board report. “Alternative tools are needed to find and index data in the deep web … Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where the [intelligence] community is most comfortable.” With its new Utah Data Center, the NSA will at last have the technical capability to store, and rummage through, all those stolen secrets. The question, of course, is how the agency defines who is, and who is not, “a potential adversary.”

The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) | Threat Level | Wired.com

[Chris the Chees]

Even in the '70s more SIGINT (Signal Intelligence, which at the time included all electronic intercepts) was collected than could be properly analyzed. It was well into the '80s before much of what was intercepted in the '70s was looked at and listened to.

Absolute; though a touch anachronistic - in that it implies that the problem has only existed since the 1970s. Even the famous Sigint agencies, such as the GC&CS (Government Code and Cypher School (likely the single most successful intelligence organisation ever built)) and in the US MI8, were only capable of producing eough staff to a portion of the total signals sent. And agencies like GC&CS, for example, had a staff of 8,000+ at the height of WW2. I don't know how large the NIA is, but I doubt it has anything like the capacity to read even a tiny tiny fraction of domestic traffic, let alone on top of the foreign traffic it needs to deal with. Like any other form of information processing organisation, intelligence agencies require significant staff numbers not just to read information but to process it too. You need people to process incoming information, people to turn that information into plain text, people to translate the information, people to contextualise and analyse the information, people to catalogue and index that information and then people to distribute that information further. You then also need a huge administrative and technical staff to make the whole operation actually run, plus managers, researchers, trainers, liason officers, machine operators, building staff, cleaners, drivers, security, ad infinitum. And we are talking about what? Billions of messages each day?