What does NSA know about you? Does it bother you?

[Marka]

I've just been wondering, what kind and how much information about me can agencies like NSA and CIA already extract from their data...

I'm using facebook since 2009, gmail since forever, basically 99.9% of all my online correspondence with other people or informations I shared online is in one way or another accessible to anyone who has access to services I used (facebook, gmail, ...).

Now I beat myself because I wasn't more careful at least with obvious things like usernames on forums (for example my previous username here included my name and year of birth, and not only here, wtf I was stupid) and even when I did take precautions, they were ineffective.

The stance I have taken lately is that what is done is done, now that everything is out and accessible to those interested, I can be more relaxed about sharing my online past (majority of it is available through google anyway), but at the same time also more careful in the future. Today I take encryption much more seriously, and for really personal and/or important things, nothing beats the old way of using a pen and paper and scanning it and hosting it on your server long enough for the other person to read it. After all, no automatic system can read my latinic/cyrillic writting if I don't want it to :)

--->
And what about you?

[Karin]

I've just been wondering, what kind and how much information about me can agencies like NSA and CIA already extract from their data...

https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/1044725_10200570297554075_563759167_n.jpg

:D:D:D

[ALS]

Everyone has known for probably at least the last ten years that all phone calls coming in or out of the U.S. are recorded. Rule one do not put anything up on the internet if you don't want someone to know about it. Facebook privacy settings are not worth crap when it comes to these guys.

The thing you have to remember if you never get on their radar they have no reason to hunt through the billions of Tera Bytes of information they have amassed, looking for information on you. There are only so many people working on information recovery and it does take man hours to sift through all that data to find specific information on an individual. So unless you've done something stupid like make threats against a public official on line for example, which will get you automatically put on the to do list, no one in the Government is really interested in your petty little life. <- "Sarcasm"

[lefty12357]

One also should remember that similar programs probably exist in many countries. And don't forget that it is not only governments, but also all the corporations that collect data on all of us. As ALS said, the government tends to just store it and only looks at it if they need to connect the dots on a specific case. It's not humanly possible to listen to or look at even a small percentage of communications, much less every communication that occurs each day.

[Ray4AJ]

Eh, I don't worry about them. Their headquarters isn't too far from me. Here is a photo of it I took of it and posted on Instagram a few weeks ago:

http://distilleryimage9.s3.amazonaws.com/7f440f0ed6e111e2846522000a1f9d5a_6.jpg

For years they just intercepted communications looking for spies and decrypting codes to figure out what was going on in the world. Now that's been expanded but I don't think they really care about most of what goes on on the internet.

I used to be into amateur radio and many of the members of the local radio club worked there and they were regular people (well, mostly math and computer types :) ) and they were allowed to say that they worked there, just not what they actually did.

I prefer to concern myself with all the businesses that collect information on me and try to use that for their interests and at my expense. It's a losing battle and my efforts aren't foolproof but I try not to make it too easy to be profiled by data collectors. I'll never be able to stop the NSA from figuring out anything they want to know. Not that they care about me.

[Marka]

The whole thing is disturbing for me not because I care that much about personal information being available to anybody, the biggest problem for me is what kinds of problems this information can create for someone in his life. I am not hinting at anything connected with me here, it is about the principle.

Of course, such agencies can detect plans for pure violence and aggression this way, but hey, almost all (99.99999%) such acts are in some way or another linked to the very thing such agencies are created to defend. That means, that the main task of such organizations is to prevent acts that could change the way the things are perceived and done. I don't care for patriotism and love for one's country nor for any other mindless affairs people are taught since they are born, but I do care when acts and measures of people whom I consider to be good are stopped and when such people are disabled. Let such organizations battle among themselves and country's past demons (for example, terrorism), but the moment when something which I consider a good cause has been lost due to such organizations, I am no longer neutral towards them. Of course, my non-neutrality does not matter, but so does nobody's else.

The only thing left to people like Snowden is to take the cyanide pill.