It's really no surprise that NSA has been monitoring everyone

[PuppyBismark]

From a technical point-of-view, they would have had to be doing this. We should not be surprised. Once again the MSM didn't do the technical homework needed to understand an issue.

When one thinks about the national communication network and all its parts, it becomes clear that all traffic has to be available to the government for them to look at the parts they want to see. Networking companies such as AT&T, Sprint, etc. cannot make the investment in equipment and systems to just give the government what they think they may want, so it dumps everything to NSA and they get to look at what they want.

Thus it is no surprise that they have everything. If you listened to Tice on Countdown yesterday, he mentioned "meta data." I suspect what that is is the call detail of every call and the routing of data traffic. It may also include the actual data traffic itself, but I suspect not, because the volume of data that passes across the networks would fill more disks than anyone including the government could afford. He kept talking about looking at patterns, and again that is consistent with collecting the routing information.

NSA agents can then search this "meta data" for patterns and then get selected traffic which would be more manageable. In the case of monitoring reporters, they would take the data about who talked to who and look for leaks, calls to known targets, etc. As Keith said today, in the case of reporters, this was more of a method to make sure whistle blowers are detected or detoured from "talking." Pretty effective method to have folks keep quiet.

The next question is how long do they keep the data on line, and what do they do with "old" data. For a government whose White House can't keep track of email, perhaps they should use NSA to archive all White House mail and messages, but then.........

[Lint Head]

1. This information can be used to imprison us all.

Currently not in a physical way but in a controlling way. The government has invaded our privacy for totally reckless reasons.
This is not keeping us safe. It is endangering our freedom.

[L. Coyote]

2. The meta data is like the full header of an e-mail, to, from .... Here is what they do:

All communications are split by an optical splitter, into two identical streams. One stream goes to the NSA. It is then routed to a known nation and thru several countries. This means all communications are now outside the USA where US laws do not apply. It goes to a US facility overseas where all the data is stored. It is then processed by reading the meta data and the subjects of interest are identified and their data is collected and saved. It can also all be searched for keywords, etc. and new targets identified. Also, the meta tags reveal every person a target e-mails, adding to the list of targets, etc.

What is most significant is that the data is all sent outside the USA to avoid/circumvent the laws and the Constitution.
That was their rationalization, per my informant, who is neither Tice nor Mark Klein, but a third, totally independent source!

This is no surprise because you could read it on DU all along!!

Deja DU: Nov 2007 Are ALL COMMUNICATIONS routed overseas to circumvent US law and the Constitution?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2245762

"I was told years ago that ALL fiber optic communication traffic was routed overseas so that "everything" was moved outside the protections of the law and Constitution and ANYTHING could be monitored. I thought the idea quite fantastic even though it came from a very reliable source that would know exactly such things. Then, the story of the fiber optic splitters hit my radar. I now see now how easily exactly that, routing ALL COMMUNICATIONS overseas, was accomplished. .... "

.....

[arcadian]

3. That means they would have to have an analyst for every single person they monitor.

The math simply doesn't pan out. yeah they can pull it all in, but can they examine it all? the answer is no.