*Why the NSA's Defense of Mass Data Collection Makes No Sense* /The U.S. intelligence community claims it's not spying on citizens until someone actually looks at the data it collects. That argument is deeply flawed. /Bruce Schneier Oct 21 2013, 8:00 AM ET The basic government defense of the NSA's bulk-collection programs---whether it be the list of all the telephone calls you made <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court...>, your email address book and IM buddy list <http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-collects-millions-...>, or the messages <http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data> you send your friends---is that what the agency is doing is perfectly legal, and doesn't really count as surveillance, until a human being looks at the data. It's what Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper meant when he lied to Congress <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/director-national-intelligences-word-g...>. When asked, "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" he replied, "No sir, not wittingly." To him, the definition of "collect" requires that a human look at it. So when the NSA collects---using the dictionary definition of the word---data on hundreds of millions of Americans, it's not /really/ collecting it, because only computers process it. The NSA maintains that we shouldn't worry about human processing, either, because it has rules about accessing all that data. General Keith Alexander, director of the NSA, said that <http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/nsa-director-gives-firm-and-broad-defen...> in a recent /New York Times/ interview: "The agency is under rules preventing it from investigating that so-called haystack of data unless it has a 'reasonable, articulable' justification, involving communications with terrorists abroad, he added." There are lots of things wrong with this defense. [...] Continua qui: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/10/why-the-nsas-defense-of-...