Out of Pod Experience

Spy on everyone. Claim to be after bad guys.

Does the NSA even know how to process all that raw data into useful information ?

Is there anyone working for the NSA who will even ask that question ?

More like the price that has to be paid for letting your government gain too much power over you.

I hope the NSA enjoys going through my search history. It was a VERY interesting month for me .

Think about how much damage could be done if an enemy of the US figured out how to get a copy of all the data NSA malware is collecting.
After all, this enemy of the US (or the NSA staff spying on people for personal reasons) knows who he wants to spy on. Making it much easier for him to convert the data into useful information.

Now consider the NSA admitting that the only way it knows which documents Snowden took is when someone with a copy makes a document public. Or that they didn't know Snowden took anything until he said so publicly. Now ask yourself: Who else might have grabbed a copy and said nothing ?

No need to.

Once you have all that raw, unprocessed data, you can just use a search engine like for e.g. google once you know what to look for.

As soon as you have the tech, easy as pie.

That's the thing most people don't understand.

The NSA or any other intel Service may not be spying on anyone specific, most of that data will be deleted after some time and nobody (at least no person) will ever have taken even so much as a glance at that data. But as soon as someone decides "look for all persons that did XY, one law or another changed and now they're all criminals" that's what you really should be afraid of.

They're having secret courts, passing laws that strip you of your civil rights and in general they're doing stuff that no sane citizen would ever agree upon, "for your own safety".

Lots of states are treating their own citizen as if they were an enemy of the government they voted for and in doing so, they actually become the enemy of the people they were supposed to serve (yes I still belive that any modern democratic government should be the servant of it's people, not the ruler).

Meh, I'll stop here before this post turns into some random rant.

The information the NSA collects is sufficiently different from existing search engines that the NSA will need to write their own, or at least heavily modify one, to get it working. Plus you're assuming the NSA knows what to look for. Finding information on a known target is simple. Sifting through all that data to find a known target, that's hard. The first is closer to what existing search engines do than the second.
Telling a forigner from an American would be simpler than what search engines do. But even that is too hard for the NSA

Has the NSA helped catch anyone ?
Have they done so with their spy on everyone programs ?

Article on the past activities Keith Alexander, the guy now in charge of the NSA

"Alexander tended to be a bit of a cowboy: 'Let's not worry about the law. Let's just figure out how to get the job done,'" says a former intelligence official who has worked with both men.
See how Kieth doesn't care about the law.

The general didn't say how exactly to make this determination, but it was all the justification Alexander needed. "Hayden's attitude was 'Yes, we have the technological capability, but should we use it?' Keith's was 'We have the capability, so let's use it,'" says the former intelligence official who worked with both men.
If we have the capability, don't question if it's moral to use it. Don't question if it's useful to use it. Just use it.

Alexander wants as much data as he can get. And he wants to hang on to it for as long as he can. To prevent the next terrorist attack, he thinks he needs to be able to see entire networks of communications and also go "back in time," as he has said publicly, to study how terrorists and their networks evolve. To find the needle in the haystack, he needs the entire haystack.

"Alexander's strategy is the same as Google's: I need to get all of the data," says a former administration official who worked with the general. "If he becomes the repository for all that data, he thinks the resources and authorities will follow."
Collect it under the belief that it will be useful. Figure out what to do with it later.

As for his competency in processing data:
When he ran INSCOM and was horning in on the NSA's turf, Alexander was fond of building charts that showed how a suspected terrorist was connected to a much broader network of people via his communications or the contacts in his phone or email account.

"He had all these diagrams showing how this guy was connected to that guy and to that guy," says a former NSA official who heard Alexander give briefings on the floor of the Information Dominance Center. "Some of my colleagues and I were skeptical. Later, we had a chance to review the information. It turns out that all [that] those guys were connected to were pizza shops."

A retired military officer who worked with Alexander also describes a "massive network chart" that was purportedly about al Qaeda and its connections in Afghanistan. Upon closer examination, the retired officer says, "We found there was no data behind the links. No verifiable sources. We later found out that a quarter of the guys named on the chart had already been killed in Afghanistan."

These were the charts he was showing off. The charts he was confident about.

Under Alexander's leadership, one of the agency's signature analysis tools was a digital graph that showed how hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people, places, and events were connected to each other. They were displayed as a tangle of dots and lines. Critics called it the BAG -- for "big ass graph" -- and said it produced very few useful leads. CIA officials in charge of tracking overseas terrorist cells were particularly unimpressed by it. "I don't need this," a senior CIA officer working on the agency's drone program once told an NSA analyst who showed up with a big, nebulous graph. "I just need you to tell me whose ass to put a Hellfire missile on."
The CIA didn't like the charts the NSA produced. Too much data, no useful information.

Since I'm hitting the character limit, I don't have room for James Heath, someone who has followed Alexander from position to position, probably because Alexander asked for him. Someone with a reputation for not caring about the expense, and for leaving expensive projects unfinished. Someone who also believes that big data is the solution, even if the facts disagree.

"There's two ways of looking at these guys," the retired military officer says. "Two visionaries who took risks and pushed the intelligence community forward. Or as two guys who blew a monumental amount of money."
Which are you going with ?

As I see it, the NSA is invading peoples privacy for no gain in security. Making my position simple, as the NSA is doing nothing to offset the harm in loss of privacy or to justify it's huge budget. Prove that the NSA actually helps make America secure and my position will need to be reevaluated.

I seriously seriously doubt that

Jeez the old soviet union wasn't even this bad...

At which point does "In the interest of nationality security" become an invasion of peoples privacy ect.

Not quite. Nobody has the Power to do anything about it.

Nobody is even sure just what exact entity is behind it all (hint: it ain't the NSA).

If the only rule set would be "do no harm", that should be easy to automate given sufficiently decent surveillance.
And you only need a jury-like group of random people (the more, the merrier) to decide whether stuff that gets flagged is really bad or not.