RT:
Former CIA director: ‘We kill people based on metadata’
May 12, 2014 by
Published time: May 12, 2014 18:27
Edited time: May 12, 2014 19:27
At a
recent debate concerning the National Security Agency’s bulk surveillance
programs, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden admitted that metadata is
used as the basis for killing people.Edited time: May 12, 2014 19:27
The comments were made during a debate at Johns Hopkins
University, after Georgetown University Law Center professor David Cole
detailed the kind of information the government can obtain simply by collecting
metadata – who you call, when you call them, how long the call lasts, and how
often calls between the two parties are made.
Although NSA supporters often claim such metadata collection is
permissible considering the content of the call is not collected, Cole argued
that is not the case, since the former general counsel of the NSA, Stewart
Baker, has already stated metadata alone is more than enough to reveal vast amounts
of an individual’s personal information
Writing in the New York Review of
Books, Cole elaborated (you can also watch his explanation around the 14 minute
mark of the embedded video):
“Of course knowing the content of a call can be crucial to establishing a
particular threat. But metadata alone can provide an extremely detailed picture
of a person’s most intimate associations and interests, and it’s actually much
easier as a technological matter to search huge amounts of metadata than to
listen to millions of phone calls. As NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker has
said, ‘metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you
have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.’
“When I quoted Baker at a recent debate at Johns Hopkins
University, my opponent, General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and
the CIA, called Baker’s comment ‘absolutely correct,’ and raised him one, asserting,
‘We kill people based on metadata.’”
Hayden paused after making this statement – around the 18 minute
mark of the video – and then qualified it by adding,“but that’s not what we do with
this metadata.”
Presumably, when Hayden emphasizes “this metadata,” he is referring to the
information collected from American citizens. As RT reported in February, the US is
already using metadata to select targets for drone strikes around the world. In
a report for the Intercept, an unnamed drone operator – backed up by documents
leaked by Edward Snowden – said the agency analyzes metadata as well as
mobile-tracking technology to determine targets, without employing human
intelligence to confirm a suspect’s identity.
“People get hung up that there’s a targeted list of people,” the
operator said. “It’s really like we’re targeting a
cell phone. We’re not going after people – we’re going after their phones, in
the hopes that the person on the other end of that missile is the bad guy.”
According to Cole, the realization that the NSA is collecting such
vast amounts of information has prompted action from both Democrats and
Republicans in Washington. Last week, two committees in the House of
Representatives recently voted unanimously to support the USA Freedom Act,
which would bar the NSA from collecting metadata in bulk. The data would remain
in the possession of telecommunications companies, only to be accessed by the
government if it can prove reasonable suspicion to the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court.
As noted by Cole, however, the bill doesn’t address all the facets
of the NSA’s surveillance program. As its currently written, the Freedom Act
only applies to American citizens, not foreigners who are also under
surveillance, nor does it address what he termed the NSA’s “guerilla-like
tactics of inserting vulnerabilities into computer software and drivers, to be
exploited later to surreptitiously intercept private communications.”
As RT reported previously, the NSA
designed at least two encryption tools offered by the security firm RSA – one
of which was made the default option, and which allowed the NSA to easily
infiltrate computer security systems.
1 comment:
Just WHO interprets the metadata to achieve the end results that WE CAN TAKE OUT THESE BASTARDS and put an end once and for all to the pain and suffering these bastards create daily? Who the hell do these reps think they are - god himself - to decide who should live and who should die in order to achieve their purpose????
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