NSA has direct access to tech giants' systems for user data, secret files reveal

guardian.co.uk

22 points·justinweiss··3 comments

This is not surprising, is it? I don't quite get why this and yesterday's story about NSA mobile eavesdropping are causing so much shock. Over a year ago, WIRED featured a story by James Bamford about the NSA's planned data center in Utah, sourcing an anonymous former intelligence officer who said that the NSA had been installing controlled equipment at ISP facilities for years. (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/)

It isn't surprising, but it is worth talking about.

I subscribe to "nothing to hide" but it would be nice to, at least, have some notification and callback over who had access to my personal details.

I don't really mid my information bing used to infer if pot-holes are more important to fix than water leaks. I do however object, without prior consent, for my details to be a way of supporting political movements /ideologies.

Yup, agreed. Although I bet there's a less intrusive means of aggregating citizen data germane to things like road maintenance than capturing our web browsing history, emails, and phone calls. IBM's Smart Cities initiative is essentially all about that -- distributing sensors throughout infrastructure for the purpose of gathering just that sort of data. That seems like a much more worthy investment in technology than massive data centers that suck up our chatter -- chatter which we have a reasonable expectation of privacy over, by the way.

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