NSA claims they only checked 300 numbers against their list. How'd they get that list? | #Snowden

Rep. Mike Rodgers (R-MI) reveals more details of the PRISM program. Via Slashdot:

"If they think that's relevant to their counterterrorism investigation, they give that to the FBI. Then upon the FBI has to go out and meet all the legal standards to even get whose phone number that is."

Additionally we hear this from the AP:

... programs run by the National Security Agency thwarted potential terrorist plots in the U.S. and more than 20 other countries — and that gathered data is destroyed every five years. Last year, fewer than 300 phone numbers were checked against the database of millions of U.S. phone records ...

Got that? They claim to have a list of millions of phone numbers, against which they only checked 300 numbers last year, and those checks were all done with all the proper legal measures. (In fact, I submit that we knew this in 2005.)

I want to know what criteria they used to generate that list of millions of phone numbers.

More precisely, I want to know what criteria they used to build the training data sets to train the classifiers that filtered through all our communications metadata (and probably our communications content data as well) in order to generate that list.

What are they looking for? How do they say that a phone call or text message goes into the training set or stays out?

That's what I want to know; not the details of Snowden's sex life or whatever the media are pushing now.

Monday miscellany! (#guns, #syria, #turkey, #SCOTUS, #Arizona, and more!)

• Turks are rioting in Istanbul after the government tried to violently quash omnibus protests. So much for that! And yes, this does affect America's ability to form a coalition in their Syrian proxy war, which might be a possible motivation for renewed claims of WMD use.


• Have you noticed that, since Sandy Hook, more television shows (like Burn Notice and Psych) have referred to fully automatic weapons as "semi-automatic?" I have, and I wonder how much the White House is paying those shows to push their messaging. It wouldn't be the first time the government has done this.


• SCOTUS rules that Arizona must accept Federal voter ID standards and can't impose their own, more strict and odious standards. The Federal standard requires that one swears out an affidavit that one is a US citizen. That's it. No trying to find birth certificates and marriage licenses from the days before they kept archival grade copies of records, no de-facto poll taxes, no fooling around. It'll be interesting to see how hard other states (Georgia, Wisconsin) fight this.


• Chicago just had its deadliest weekend so far this year - at least six dead, 40 shot overall. Second Amendment advocates will point out that this happened in the city with the strictest gun control laws in the nation, and that it demonstrates the futility of banning guns. Fair enough, but it also points to the necessity of a framework to address the flow of guns into the hands of gangbangers. Universal background checks were supposed to be a part of that, if only because it gave the police another hammer with which to beat gun traffickers.


• A woman is suing the McDonald's she worked at because they would only pay her with a pre-paid debit card. It's not just that the debit card is heavy on fees, by the way; it's that it's her only option. Even direct deposit to an other account, or being paid by check, were not open to her. This needs to be nipped in the bud now before owing your soul to the company bank becomes the future for low-wage workers.