>I’d categorize it more as ‘collecting’ than ‘monitoring,’
>China filters outside traffic, and the U.S. doesn’t, so the U.S. must not be collecting that data for later analysis.
>I had a friend who worked for the NSA who told me it was alright. I suppose that means it was alright.
You’re trying to cast ambiguity on things that are already wide public knowledge. The NSA collects and *analyzes* this data. That the U.S. doesn’t block Chinese websites on an ISP level is entirely irrelevant. It makes no technical sense to halt a user’s internet connection in real time while you analyze it for terrorist activity, when you can concurrently send it off to an NSA server and get the same analysis seconds later. The Great Firewall is analyzing ISP traffic so that it can find its destination and drop it if it’s on a blacklist. These are two completely different technical and political goals.
There is always going to be far more data than is being used when you collect data on the scale the NSA does. While I generally don’t think you shouldn’t take this guys word at face value, this fact does not preclude any level of surveillance or misconduct on the NSA’s part. NSA employees could be sitting in their office chairs nine hours of the day looking at nudes or emails of journalists and “most data would remain unused”, or so your coworker might report.
2. With regards to the ones I’m familiar, you are, in practice, incorrect, or at least most police/spy agencies currently disagree with your cost benefit analysis. This is like saying that it’s better to try to collude with the bartender at a place where the Mafia hangs out than it is to just plant wiretaps when everyone has for the night. The NSA and the MSS don’t *want* people who work at a technology company to know how and where they are collecting data. It unnecessarily compromises the entire point of collecting such data in the first place. The average user is nabbed in the process of clandestinely hacking “high value targets” like Google.
1.
>I’d categorize it more as ‘collecting’ than ‘monitoring,’
>China filters outside traffic, and the U.S. doesn’t, so the U.S. must not be collecting that data for later analysis.
>I had a friend who worked for the NSA who told me it was alright. I suppose that means it was alright.
You’re trying to cast ambiguity on things that are already wide public knowledge. The NSA collects and *analyzes* this data. That the U.S. doesn’t block Chinese websites on an ISP level is entirely irrelevant. It makes no technical sense to halt a user’s internet connection in real time while you analyze it for terrorist activity, when you can concurrently send it off to an NSA server and get the same analysis seconds later. The Great Firewall is analyzing ISP traffic so that it can find its destination and drop it if it’s on a blacklist. These are two completely different technical and political goals.
There is always going to be far more data than is being used when you collect data on the scale the NSA does. While I generally don’t think you shouldn’t take this guys word at face value, this fact does not preclude any level of surveillance or misconduct on the NSA’s part. NSA employees could be sitting in their office chairs nine hours of the day looking at nudes or emails of journalists and “most data would remain unused”, or so your coworker might report.
2. With regards to the ones I’m familiar, you are, in practice, incorrect, or at least most police/spy agencies currently disagree with your cost benefit analysis. This is like saying that it’s better to try to collude with the bartender at a place where the Mafia hangs out than it is to just plant wiretaps when everyone has for the night. The NSA and the MSS don’t *want* people who work at a technology company to know how and where they are collecting data. It unnecessarily compromises the entire point of collecting such data in the first place. The average user is nabbed in the process of clandestinely hacking “high value targets” like Google.