Documents leaked about 10 years ago relating to the American National Security Agencies work at Menwith Hills, (field station 8613,) in Yorkshire, gave a lot of details about how they do this. They can monitor more than 300,000 emails & phone calls per day using a system called Moonpenny, which can monitor the activity of 163 satellites & store the data it receives.
they also have numerous other monitoring abilities there relating to under sea cables & US owned satellites used specifically for monitoring. Where for example they can even monitor wi-fi activity in a targetted area.
The leaked documents reveal that during one 12 hour period in May 2011, Memwith Hill logged 335 million metadata records, or 28 million per hour. These will have contained details such as the sender & recipient of an email, or the phone numbers someone called and at what time it was logged.
I believe they do yes. Not for nefarious purposes, but its funny how suddenly you get adverts relating to the email you sent to Irene about the new sofa you were looking at getting before ChristmasâŠ
Thatâs fine but you only have to meet someone who has a smartphone for their device to listen to your conversations. It wonât lead to information on your browser but it will on theirs and the conversation, well who knows who is recording.
Some email services scan your emails in order to show you personalised or targeted ads. You could argue that thatâs a benefit, because youâll see ads in which you might have some interest. You could also argue that your emails are private, so itâs an invasion of privacy. Either way, itâs no different from scanning your emails to stop viruses and phishing attempts, which nobody wants to stop.
I believe emails are scanned for known dodgy links and attachments. I think that is a necessary and a good part of the service. I read the body of text in e-mails was scanned for keywords and subsequent advertising but I suppose thatâs nor the same as someone sitting there reading your e-mails. Perhaps certain words or phrases would trigger an alert if they suggested criminal activities.
I thought this scanning was stopped now but maybe not.
The fact that anyone. Be it government, or commercial information farmer uses software to gather information is not connected with them reading emails. That is the danger, they can farm vast quantities of information that tells them an awful lot & they have never read anything, just executed a mathematical formula.
Donât confuse the farming of information with the reading of emails, or any of our other data. They farm information in a much more subtle way. It is no less an invasion of our privacy. But it is not like old fashioned information gathering. Thus it may not be covered by old privacy laws & some less technical people may not see the dangers inherent in it, as it does not fit with their understanding of what is happening.
Data gathering is not longer about what it was 20 years ago. It is now much more pervasive & much more wide spread. But it is not, in general, reading your emails exact word for word content.
There is clearly a difference between what a government does reasonably in the name of criminal investigation & national security & what a government, or commercial information farmer, does in the name of simply gathering commercial information.
We only have to look at the appalling way the Met, sorry the association of chief police officers, has behaved re itâs old Special Demonstration Squad, to see some behaviour is known to be so dodgy, that it has been performed at arms length, to stop even the government from being able to properly investigate it. But providing public oversight is available. There is largely a difference between government & private data farming.
Yes & that is the problem we face, re, data farming. It does not make sense to many technically unaware people. As they do not understand what it now is & what it means. Thus they argue from a point of ignorance. Differing in opinion is not the issue. But not understanding what is happening & not informing yourself is an issue when it comes to something like privacy.
Weâre all ignorant arenât we? Best assume the safest way to communicate is face to face in the bathroom with the tap running.
I read a crime fiction book a couple of years ago about these guys that communicate via an email address, no emails are sent, they get typed and saved to drafts, others can log in read the draft and reply using the same method. I bet the worlds underworld are on the that, and hopefully the cops are not far behind.
I like Tutanota mail. End to end encryption for messages between Tutanota accounts. And the method of sending nothing, but saving it, works great. I used a free website builder & web address for some free radio comms a few years ago. The website never went live. But remained private, several of us had the email address & password to access the offline site builder & we simply changed one of the pages. The idea was not to use it for anything illegal, just maybe have some fun. Who knows who is checking what?
Edited to add. Using one of the email onions available via Tor is of course, reasonably safe too.
Yes, the far right & jihadis love it. But itâs not safe, just safer.
Telegram is simply a welcoming place for the unpleasant. With hate speech, be it from jihadis, or neo natziâs being more than tolerated on itâs various groups.
YouTube ads are getting quite intrusive too, so much so that instead of watching on my TV I watch on my computer where there are no ads so both the content provider and Google miss out.
