The NSA Is Collecting Lots of Spam 159
wiredog writes "One side effect of the NSA's surveillance program is that a great deal of spam is getting swept up along with the actual communications data. Overwhelming amounts, perhaps. From The Washington Post: '[W]hen one Iranian e-mail address of interest got taken over by spammers ... the Iranian account began sending out bogus messages to its entire address book. ... the spam that wasn't deleted by those recipients kept getting scooped up every time the NSA's gaze passed over them. And as some people had marked the Iranian account as a safe account, additional spam messages continued to stream in, and the NSA likely picked those up, too....Every day from Sept. 11, 2011 to Sept. 24, 2011, the NSA collected somewhere between 2 GB and 117 GB of data concerning this Iranian address."
Spam - the perfect cloak (Score:5, Insightful)
So if I want to do terrorist stuff - I should probably hide my communications inside emails about ch3ap V!agr@. Eventually the NSA will have to get a mail washer to help filter out the crap and my criminal activity will go un-noticed.
Re:Spam - the perfect cloak (Score:5, Insightful)
Shouldn't be too hard to write steganography software that hid its messages in the pseudo-random changes to the text for filter evasion. You'd just need a good library of spam message templates of varying length to use as the chaff. For better results, run the same process with random messages that are sent out as part of the same bulk mailing blast to a large list of spam recipients to make it impossible to tell which message is important and which is not. Two terrorists can converse by broadcasting garbage to the world.
Now that I think of it, I wonder if that's the reason I get spam messages with no attachments or links to tell me where to get the product should I have a temporarily absence from reason and want to actually purchase them...
Re:A Herring? (Score:4, Insightful)
When most of the population (both US and World) collectively say, "That is an ridiculous and unreasonable abuse of power!!!!" I am fairly sure it is covered by the fourth amendment.
This is the reasonably discredited concept that the world has some vote on what the US Constitution should say. What the Fourth Amendment says is not subject to the opinion of Germany or Kenya or Mexico or China or ... nor should it be.
Even though some errant Supreme Court justices keep yapping about applying world concepts to US constitutional law, that's not how it is supposed to work. If the founders had wanted us to follow Greek laws, they would have put Greek laws in the US books, not assumed that 21st century justices would look to Greece as an example of how to run a country.
Simply put, if they want to search a citizen's property (digital or physical), then they need to get a warrant for that specific search.
Unfortunately, the Fourth Amendment did not put it so simply. The founders could have worded it that simply. The fact that they included the term "unreasonable" in the prohibition means they meant for there to be a concept of "reasonable" that wasn't prohibited. Nor did they use the simple words "A warrant is required for all searches."
These were simple people, doing a large task. They could have used simple words if they said what they meant. Since they did not, the clear implication is that the concepts are more complex than you make them out to be, and that they understood that.