ICREACH and outrage
So I’m a little confused about some aspects of the latest from Greenwald, “ICREACH”.
The tl;dr is it’s a search engine for all the BAD STUFF, that has some cross-agency features.
Taking it from the top:
* wow they made a search engine? um OK what a completely obvious thing to do. It’s one of the first things I did for my current employer, for example (ElasticSearch FTW).
* well, there’s the usual stuff about retention and access; but that’s already covered by prior revelations, so there’s nothing new there/I have outrage fatigue.
* Then there’s this:
ICREACH does not appear to have a direct relationship to the large NSA database, previously reported by The Guardian, that stores information on millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Unlike the 215 database, which is accessible to a small number of NSA employees and can be searched only in terrorism-related investigations, ICREACH grants access to a vast pool of data that can be mined by analysts from across the intelligence community for “foreign intelligence”—a vague term that is far broader than counterterrorism.
So it’s stuff that has already met a certain set of criteria for “not US Citizen data”? If that’s true then the last line is scare-quote nonsense, yes?
* is “Executive Order 12333” the “Agenda 21” of the Greenwald crowd?
* wasn’t to “allow unprecedented volumes of communications metadata to be shared and analyzed” part of the things we all decided was necessary to prevent another 9/11? Look I’m not saying this is all perfectly OK and we should just accept it but in terms of “mission statement”, using that as a scare-quote seems odd.
* srsly Netscape 6 w/ AOL are you kidding me (page 22)
I dunno. The whole thing stinks, to be sure: all that data, managed by fallible humans and their fragile processes they create. Nonetheless, “we made a search engine for sharing vetted data between applicable agencies” is not the worst thing ever.