Guardian: "XKeyscore: NSA tool collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet'"

[backscatter712]

118. The real technical magic is in the search engines.

Most of the traffic can be easily filtered out - DDNS packets can be immediately identified and discarded, for example, as can most kinds of spam.

And the useful bits can often also be easily identified - when you see data going back and forth between a random user and one of Facebook's servers, that indicates it might contain something useful.

But like I said, there's a reason they're building that monster data center in Utah - because they're doing the same thing Google is doing - search engines on a massive scale.

If Google can find useful information in the middle of the Internet and put it at your reach at the click of a mouse, certainly the NSA can do that too.

Except they're not indexing and searching public web pages. They're indexing and searching your metadata, your private emails & phone calls, your social networks...

As for linguistics - again, that can be augmented by software - Google Translate, for example can usually make a comprehensible, if awkward, English translation of any web page in a foreign language. The linguists would only be needed for the tough cases.

I'll say it yet again - the NSA has built Google for Tyrants.