Stuff You Should Know - How the NSA Works

Episode Date: August 12, 2014

Chuck and Josh dive into the secret world of the National Security Agency, from the origins of the snooping outfit, to the recent revelations from whistleblower Edward Snowden. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-Pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Just a Skyline drive on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, it's Chikis from Chikis and Chill Podcast and I want to tell you about a really exciting episode. We're going to be talking to Nancy Rodriguez from Netflix's Love is Blind Season 3. Looking back at your experience, were there any red flags that you think you missed? What I saw as a weakness of his, I wanted to embrace. The way I thought of it was whatever love I have from you is extra for me. I already love myself enough.

Do I need you to validate me as a partner? Yes. Is it required for me to feel good about myself? No. Listen to Chikis and Chill on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry with their stories she makes up and this is Stuff You Should Know. Yeah, we have a Jerry story, but not for this one for the other one we're recording. Right. And spoiler coming up. What's the spoiler? Like you just gave a spoiler about a spoiler. I think that Jerry has a personal story relating to the second of the two shows we're recording

today. Gotcha. Not much of a spoiler, but people love any nugget from Jerry, they're like, oh my god, what is it? Right. Especially when she talks. Yeah. Chuck.

Yes. So if we weren't on any sort of watch list before, after researching yesterday and today for this episode, we most decidedly are. We're on some kind of red list. Yeah. If that's the highest list, I would guess we're probably on it. Yeah. I don't know if that's the highest, but it's a list that we're probably on.

Or at least on the same list as Glenn Greenwald, who I think is a righteous dude. Did you, you read his book, right? Uh-huh. Yeah. Oh, thanks for bringing that up. I think that we should point out a few pieces of required reading slash viewing for this one. Okay.

If this episode like Strikes Your Fancy, read Glenn Greenwald's book No Place to Hide. Yep. Awesome. There's all sorts of new revelations in there and like his take on the media and how it's just a great read. Yeah. Have you read it? I have not, sir.

You should. I will. You should also read Why Privacy Matters Even If You Have Nothing to Hide, which is an article by Daniel J. Solov in The Chronicle for Higher Education. That is a must read because I think that's a lot of people's argument is that, well, you know, if you're not a terrorist, then why do you care? Exactly. It does matter.

He demolishes that argument. It's a non-argument. It's a non-argument. And then you should also watch parts one and two. I think they're both online in the United States of Secrets, which is a front line. I haven't seen that. Documentary. Cool.

It's amazing. Yeah. It's so good. And front liney, which is always good. Yeah. It's just like a great nonfiction magazine article, but for your eyes. Come to life. Yeah.

Thanks, man. Sure. So was there anything in here that you didn't really know? About the NSA? Uh-huh. Well, yeah. I mean, I imagine we'll cover it in this order, which is a little bit about the organization and then all the scary things that they do.

Right. But, yeah. I mean, I read a lot of Edward Snowden's revelations, but there are so many. I think you have to read a book. Yeah. When we were researching this, there were things like that I didn't know about. Sure. And it's such an ongoing, like, ever-evolving story, too, that, like, if I was reading an

article and it was from longer than a year ago, you know, it was virtually useless because that was priest Snowden revelations. And then even the stuff that came out in, like, June 2013, it's, they seem so naive now. Yeah. It's just like, oh, the NSA's admitted to this. Oh, and it turns out that they were totally lying. Right, so now they've admitted to this, and then, you know, it just kept expanding and

every time, like, they were just, just admitting, just the barest minimum, and then there was another revelation, and it just showed that whatever they admitted to could be magnified times a thousand or whatever. Yeah. Listen to an NPR thing on just the policing of the police, essentially, or the policing of the NSA and how it's virtually impossible because their whole deal is to, and I guess this is the beginning of what they do, it's not only do they try and crack codes and intercept messages, but they're also charged with safeguarding their own, and a lot of the government agencies

own important information. So the police and organization like that is just, it's an exercise in futility because their job is to avoid that. Yeah, they encrypt and decrypt. Yeah. It's tough, and there's no checks and balances, it seems like, and it's scary. Yeah, there's supposed to be, but we'll talk about that in a minute. So let's talk NSA.

The whole thing came about in 1952 under Harry Truman, the S-std for nothing. Yeah, and I want to go ahead and point out now, I'm not going to get too opinionated, but I don't feel that there should not be something like the NSA because they serve a valuable service, but you have to do it in the right ways, and I don't think they are. Right. And that's the last thing I'm going to say, opinion-wise. Everything else will be just back.

I just don't want this to come across as like poo-pooing, like they should shut them down forever. Well, yeah. I think you just overtly said you don't feel that way. Okay. 1952, Harry Truman. Harry S. Truman. Yes.

And the S-std for nothing. That's right. So, he created the NSA basically to try to get electronic information, eavesdropping on other countries, and do some encryption. So, basically from the beginning, the NSA has had the same dual mission that it has today. Yeah. Officially, that's called SIGINT, which everyone loves the acronyms in these intelligence

agencies in the military, Signal Intelligence. That's the eavesdropping part. Yeah, and then information assurance, which is trying to assure them all that their information is safe. So, safeguarding and... By encrypting it. Yep. Yeah.

So, they've been doing that since the beginning. Yes. The thing is, even though they've been around since 1952, they haven't been publicly acknowledged as existing until the mid-70s, thanks to the church committee hearings, which sussed out all sorts of intelligence community abuses, like the CIA experimenting on unsuspecting Americans with LSD and what the NSA was up to, and until that point, it was just outright denied that the NSA even existed. Yeah, and a lot of people might think the CIA is the same thing, but NSA is generally

just intelligence, and CIA is acting on that intelligence. Exactly. And NSA, they're holed up in some room somewhere. And they've been keeping in lockstep over the years, well, especially since 2001, I shouldn't say over the years, but really since 2001, they've been kind of symbiotically growing with the Internet. Yeah. And as a result, they've become incredibly more prominent as far as the 17 agencies tasked

with gathering and collecting and analyzing intelligence for the executive branch to go. Maybe even more so than the CIA these days, because their job, what they do, fits so nicely into the expansion of the Internet. Like, basically, they can do their job just by tapping into the Internet, and they've spent the last decade or so figuring out how to do that more efficiently. Yeah, they love the Internet. And to gather as much stuff as possible. That's right.

It's basically like, they used to have to, and I'm not saying it's not hard work, but now basically they've said, well, all the information we need, for the most part, is now gathered in one big corral. Exactly. Called online. Yeah. And everybody, just tell your friend whatever you want. It's secret.

Yeah. You know, share what you like on Facebook. We can't put it together with all the other data and create a complete profile on you and know you better than your mother. That's why number stations, buddy, it's going to go back to the past. I wonder. I could see it. I mean, I'm surely, bad people realize that the Internet is not a safe way to do business

anymore. Yeah, but there's such a reliance on that kind of communication that it's like, I mean, have we passed the point of no return, where it's like, people just don't talk on the phone about stuff like that anymore. People don't talk on the phone anymore. You're right. Or they don't talk over email anymore. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. So, alongside the something called the CSS, the central security service, and they are basically the military side that does the same thing that the NSA does. Right. So, from what I understand, as of 2013, there was 30,000 military personnel as part of the NSA. So, maybe that's what makes up the CSS and then 60,000 to 70,000 contractors working

for the NSA. Basically, it was like 90 to 100,000 people who work for the NSA. Yeah. And that contractor's number may be going down because one of the fears that the government now has because Edward Snowden was a contractor is that we've got way too many civilian contractors working for us. Maybe so. The thing is, Snowden was portrayed as a low-level, a Booz Allen contractor.

Yeah. And did you watch the interview with him on NBC, I think, a couple months ago? It was the only American interview he's given to this point. I didn't see that one. He basically said, actually, he didn't even basically said, he said, I'm a spy. I'm a highly trained spy. This whole thing where they're saying like I was a low-level contractor, he's like, that's not true.

He said, I've been working undercover in a foreign country for the CIA. I've worked undercover in a foreign country for the NSA. So the whole idea that just some low-level contractor had access to all this stuff is not correct. He was like a pretty high-level spy. Yeah. Supposedly, they're not interested in him anymore, although I don't buy it. I don't buy that either.

They came out like literally two days ago and said, you know what? As time goes on here, his information is less and less relevant. That's now that's true. And they said, so we honestly, he's trying to cut a deal to get back to the US. And now, or at least it may change, but now they're saying, I don't really care. They have it there in Russia, like the stuff you have is old news by now. Right. And I mean, through such a wrench in the works that they may have to just go back and start

from scratch. I'm sure they'd like to get their hands on them now. Sure. And even if they're not having to start from scratch, it seems to be that the capabilities of the NSA are evolving so quick that, yeah, the snapshot that he provided from what, April 2013, as you know, now it's more than a year old, who knows how much it's changed. So you're right, like this is getting less and less relevant as it goes on. Yeah.

What's scary is that you just referred to close to two million documents as a snapshot. Yeah. And that's true. That is just a small portion of what's going on. If you're watching the NSA, though, and a lot of people are now more than ever, they appear to be continuing to expand and expand and expand. Like they've got this data center in Salt Lake City that we just opened. And it, Chuckers, is capable of storing data in the range of Zeta bytes, Z-E-T-T-A bytes.

How many terabytes is that? I don't know how many terabytes it is, but it's 1,000,000 bytes. How many big max is that? That's 22 zeros. Wow. Consider this. On the low end estimate, so they can store at least 1,000,000 bytes of data in this place in Salt Lake City.

There are, on the low end, 10, 6,000,000 stars in the entire visible universe. Wow. That's a lot of data that they just build a house for out in Salt Lake City. So they don't appear to be slowing the roll at all. No. And they, in fact, hired in 2011, 2012, about 3,500 new employees. And this article just sweetly points out, if you want to go work for the NSA, you don't even have to be a computer major.

You can major in music and history and still engage in crypt analysis. So that's good to know. Right. Because, I mean, if you think about it, sometimes they use more than just key codes. Like if somebody wanted to decrypt your number station key, they would have to be familiar with, what was it, to kill a mockingbird? Was that the book we used? Yeah.

Sure. So you would want to hire a lip major or something like that to crack, to crypt analyze something like that. That makes sense. Yeah. Plus, they train them that you're not expected to come into the NSA as a securities encryption expert. They will send you to school and class to teach you how to do this stuff.

That's right. And they have to meet certain requirements. They also have internships for students. That's right. Isn't that crazy? Can you imagine just interning at the NSA for the summer and not being killed afterward? Some of the victories over the years with the NSA, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, we should note, because of SIGINT, again, Signals Intelligence, we realized that the Russians

were not just installing, well, we discovered they were installing nuclear warheads. Right. And they just weren't vacationing in Cuba. And we also found out from SIGINT, from the NSA, is that the Russians had taken over the controls of the Cuban Missile System. So Russia installed nuclear warheads and had the key in Cuba, pointed right here at the US. Yeah.

But during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the NSA also diffused the whole thing by eavesdropping and finding some sort of transmission among, I think, the Russian Navy that showed that Russia was not going to challenge this quarantine the US had put around Cuba, which was kind of like the new line in the sand that Kennedy had drawn. Yeah. Perhaps avoided nuclear war. Right. Thanks to that intelligence.

So they have delivered the goods before. They sure have. They were under fired after 9-11 for not delivering the goods. And I remember famously said, you know, we had some communications that there was something big going down. They had like 30 of them and two specifically mentioned September 11th. Right. Like what it was or where it was and it's kind of hard to throw a dragnet over the country.

And they didn't even know it was going to be in the country, supposedly. Yeah. There's a guy in the United States of Secrets who was one of the NSA analysts who like missed 9-11. Yeah. Like one of the guys and he is a wreck. Oh, I'm sure. He's just weeping, like sobbing the whole interview.

It's really tough to watch. Yeah. The guy's just going to go to his grave like every day. Yeah. Just hating himself for it. It's really sad. That is sad. They since 9-11, a lot of changes have taken place.

Obviously we'll get to the online aspects, but it's just a different deal these days. The people that you're looking for are able to hide in plain sight and they're operating best case scenario. They're operating in a cell of, you know, a dozen people that you might be able to track. Just case scenario, you've got a single person just acting on their own, which is nearly impossible to kind of root that person out. You have to wait on, catch them in the act, which was the case in Times Square with, what was his name, Fazal Shazad.

I think that sounds right. The Times Square bomber or would be bomber. Yeah. He was a lone wolf. The thing is, a lot of people criticize the NSA for even having these cases associated with their names because these cases were made from regular old warranted police work. Yeah. Real police.

Yeah. So there's a lot of criticism that the NSA really hasn't delivered the goods for many, many years. And that one of the problems is it's drowning in data. Like it missed the Boston bombers, it missed the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber. These were even overseas targets, people like planning and plotting. Well, when you're tracking every cell phone call made in the United States, you're bound to be awash in data.

And that's probably the most salient criticism. Even Glenn Greenwald agrees with you, like that we don't need to do away with the NSA. But the problem is, if you are doing what General Keith Alexander, who runs the show there, wants, which is collect everything, then you're awash in data. It's big data with the capital B and the capital D, where you have so much data you can't make sense of anything. You can't possibly wade through it. And when you're in that situation, you can easily have something that you need and just

pass right by. So what Greenwald says is we should be targeting people more effectively, like, yes, use the NSA capabilities. They're awesome. Right. But put them to good use. Right. Don't just cast this wide net across the entire world that doesn't do anything.

Yeah. One of the big controversies that we're going to get into right after these messages has to do with warrants and whether or not you should have to have a warrant to collect information on someone. So we'll get to that right after this. On the podcast, paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second-hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look

for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Find the Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Chuck, we've been talking about the NSA. And did we even say what it stood for? Surely we did, didn't we? I don't think we did. Oh, it's the National Security Agency.

And for many years, it had the nickname No Such Agency. Yeah, because they were just so secretive. Yes. Yeah. And under a law that was passed in 1978 as part of the church committee hearings, this thing called the FISA Court was set up. And the FISA Court came out of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, FISA. And it basically said that NSA, to do its job, can go forth and eavesdrop on everybody

outside of the US. Please do. Yeah. That's your job. And that some of those people who you need to keep an eye on may actually come into the US. Well, we have a line drawn there. You guys need to get a warrant.

And since 1978, as far as anybody knew, until about 2001, 2002, that's how the NSA operated. Yeah, if you wanted to listen in on someone's phone call inside the US, you had to go to this court and get a warrant, 11 members, and out of 34,000 warrant applications between 1979 and 2012, all but 11 were passed through. Yeah. So, there was a FISA court, but they approved 99.97% of warrants. Right. So, it wasn't hard.

No. If you wanted to target somebody, all you had to do is ask. Pretty much. You know what I'm saying, just hovering right over the desk. Yeah. You know? I wonder what the deal was with those 11. They just must have been egregious.

Yeah. My paper boy. Right. The thing who overcharges. Yeah. Like, I want to spy on my paper boy and my milkman. The thing is, in 2002, a lot changed as a result of 9-11. As part of the USA Patriot Act, man, the name of that act, as part of the Patriot Act,

the NSA was given broader abilities to eavesdrop within the US. That's right. So, basically what happened was that George Bush said, the NSA can monitor international emails and phone calls if they're generated within the US as long as they're going overseas. Right. That was part of a targeted investigation. Yeah. Without a warrant.

That's right. That's the key. And that happened in 2002. The press actually knew about this. The New York Times sat on it during an election, Bush's re-election, and was roundly criticized once they finally released it in 2005 after he was re-elected. But the point is that as part of the Patriot Act and this Bush executive order, the NSA was allowed to start paying attention to business records that the feds could get from American

companies and they could eavesdrop on domestic initiated calls. Yeah. And the business records, it was an expansion there. You could always subpoena or get a warrant for business records. But under the terms it expanded to was that, quote, any tangible thing related to an investigation to obtain foreign intelligence or protect against terrorism. So any tangible thing is about as broad as it gets. It really is.

You can basically say anything. And if it's not, hey, I want to spy on my paper boy, then you can get that warrant. But if you say I want to spy on my paper boy and his name is Akbar, the FISA court would probably be like, okay, here's two. Yeah. Take two warrants. Well, yeah, I got some stuff on that we'll get to later. So as if that weren't expansive enough, I mean, having to go get a warrant and having

a 99.97% approval rate, then not having to get a warrant for a lot more stuff. If that weren't enough in 2008, Barack Obama expanded it even further. Yeah. I should say reduce the obstacles between the NSA and the information that seeks even further. He said that he, I think he signed an executive order that said that you can monitor the communications between a U.S. national and a foreign national if the foreign national is a target of an investigation.

Before it was like, oh, there's an American involved, NSA is out. Maybe we'll tip off the CIA or the FBI or something like that, but the NSA is out. That was changed in 2008. Yeah. And enacted for another five years through starting in December, 2012. Right. Isn't that right? I also did something really, really huge, the big one for the 2008 FISA expansion is

that it took away the need to get a warrant for bulk communications collection as long as it was metadata, which meant now that the NSA could go grab as much data as it wanted, phone call records, email records, all that stuff. With the help of the phone companies. As long as it didn't contain the text of the email, or it wasn't a voice recording of the phone call, they didn't need to get a warrant for everybody's stuff. Now, they still were supposed to when they found out that they had an American's information, they were supposed to destroy it unless it was related to a cyber crime, any crime at

all conceivably was related to some sort of security issue, or there's some other reason. Then they could keep it for five years and then that could be extended for another five years. And again, this is really broad stuff. So if they caught an American stuff, they can conceivably hang on to it for five years, no problem. Yeah. Yeah.

The problem here is twofold is not having a warrant is shady enough, but to have the warrants not be what they're supposed to be, which is an effective checks and balances system. The warrants system was a joke anyway. Yes. So even if they said, well, we've got to have warrants again, it's back to that joke of a system. Exactly.

So either way, it's kind of like a joke. It is. An empty process. Yeah. The joke being that there are any real checks and balances. Yes. So what came out over time over these Snowden revelations, because all of this was secret, the oversight that there was on the NSA after 2001 was just peeled back more and more and

more. And there was barely any oversight to begin with. Yeah. And that at the same time, they were expanding their capabilities too. And the third prong in this trident of cloak and dagger ishness is that they also had the complicity of telecommunications and internet companies. Yeah, with Operation Prism, which was another one of Snowden's revelation, they collect internet information, anything that you do on the internet.

Your search history, your file transfers, your emails, what you do on Facebook. And like you said, it is with the assistance of Apple and Facebook and Google and Yahoo. I don't think they've admitted that though, right? They have said basically that companies themselves, if the NSA comes with a warrant, a set of 702, I think is what it's called. From a FISA court, they hand it over. They don't like it, but they'll hand it over. But yes, I don't think they ever have publicly admitted and they've denied that they have

allowed the NSA free access into their servers. But what the Snowden files have come out and said is, here's this process where the NSA, somebody, some contractor somewhere, types into a computer that he wants, this guy's everything through prism. And then that request is routed through the FBI. The FBI sends it out to these companies who send back everything they've got on that person. And then the FBI turns around and hands it back to the NSA. And this takes between an hour and a day depending on who you ask.

And then you have everything on that person. You have photos, you have their Snapchat stuff, you have their Dropbox stuff, Facebook, Twitter, everything. You have all of their stuff, their emails, their phone calls, everything through prism. So how much the companies were complicit or not is still at issue? Yeah, one of the things Snowden said to the Guardian, the thing for Guardian was where he first dumped all this information, right? The Guardian in the Washington Post.

In the Post. He said that, I sitting at my desk could wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge or even the president if I had their personal email. Mike Rogers, Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said that that's a lie and it is impossible for him to do that. But I guess we should talk about the program X Keyscore, which basically makes it look like that's exactly what could happen. Right.

Like through X Keyscore, it's supposedly the NSA's widest reaching system for collecting electronic data. You can watch what people are doing in real-time on their Facebook page, on their Gmail account, all that jazz. And apparently, remember when we talked about is your employer spying on your episode? Yeah. That you could watch somebody while they were typing even though they hadn't saved the document or something and then they'd erase it and then retype it a different way?

This is the impression I have is that that's what X Keyscore does. Again, without attaining a warrant or even having to get your supervisor on board. Yeah. You can just, you know, if you have the access to this program, you can punch it in the name. Oh yeah. The NSA contractor? Yeah. Right.

And there's supposed to be some sort of like approval process, but apparently that's not really real either. And then check, there's one other that's kind of related to this. Up Out Jeep is a program where somehow in iPhones, there is a software implant that I don't, the impression I have is that it's in all iPhones. And from anywhere in the world, the NSA can turn your camera on, turn your microphone on, and turn your iPhone, this thing that you interact with so intimately, into a mole and it eavesdrops on you.

That's pretty scary stuff. That makes you want, not want to be yourself in your own home if your phone is sitting there. That's paranoia, but it's well-founded paranoia. Yeah. All right, well, we'll get right up to this message, so we're going to get a little bit into the non-argument that if you have nothing to hide, what's the big deal? On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second-hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to

look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop? But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay. So, the non-argument. If you have nothing to hide, then who cares? One of the problems is, it depends what the NSA considers, well, first of all, they're just mining all this bulk material from everybody.

Yeah, can I throw a couple numbers out? In one month in 2013, the NSA gathered in one month 124 billion phone calls. The whole call, not just metadata, which by the way supposedly gives a clearer picture of you and your behavior than a phone call necessarily would. And three billion of those phone calls were from the United States. That's a lot. And that's a single month, three billion phone calls? Yeah.

And then let me give you one more number. There's from the Snowden files, some journalists analyzed them. And they analyzed 160,000 emails and IM chats that the NSA collected. 90% were from average Americans and they contained identifying details, intimate details, like just the stuff like you would share to like your closest confidant. The NSA had and 90% of it was just average Americans. Well, remember when we talked about TOR in our deep web episode? That was a good one.

It's an Internet anonymizer that allows you to search the Internet supposedly anonymous. The NSA revealed recently that they consider everybody that uses TOR a potential extremist. In that 2008 FISA Amendment Act, one of the exceptions for getting rid of an American stuff is if it's encrypted. So if you are using encryption stuff, the NSA can target it and try their best to decrypt it just because it's encrypted. Yeah, everybody that, in fact, if you even visit TOR's website, you're going to be put on the NSA's red list supposedly just by visiting the site.

And as we pointed out in the deep web episode, not everyone that uses TOR is on the deep web is an extremist. There's a lot of people that just like their privacy, journalists, attorneys, civil rights activists, regular schmos that don't want to be spied on are now considered potential extremists because they don't want to be spied on. Under this 2008 executive order by Obama. That's right. Who else might be looked at?

How about potential someone you don't like in politics? It was just released, I think Greenwald was who exposed this too, that five Americans were surveilled under this program without a warrant. One was a Republican party operative. One was a civil rights activist. A few of them were professors. They were all Muslim. That's no accident.

Just regular folks though, nothing not extremist, not terrorist. The Republican party operative was served in the Navy. He's like a good dude and was being spied on. And in 2011, Wired.com revealed FBI training documents that said view all Muslims as potential radicals and NSA internal training document as a placeholder for surveillance targets uses the term Mohammed Raghead. Geez. And that's basically if you're a Muslim and you live in the United States or abroad,

then you are looked at as the enemy as far as the NSA is concerned or a potential enemy. Well that was the thing. When all of this stuff started to come out, Obama's administration was saying like, we don't spy on Americans. We're not like getting all this information on Americans. It's not Americans. It's everybody else. And the internet companies were like a good portion of our customer base overseas and

you're sitting here saying like we still target them because they're foreigners. Either way, it doesn't really dovetail with your point, but you just chugged my memory. What about spying on your wife or your girlfriend? Surely no one would ever use this capability to do something like that, right? It happens. And they have data that said they used a warrantless surveillance on wives, girlfriends, would-be girlfriends, and abuse that spawned the intelligence community's term love-int instead of sig-int. So some guy has the program open, ex-keystroke, and he's like, I wonder if my girlfriend's

cheating on me or not even that. I just want to spy on this person, this girl I want to go out with. And I'm not saying that's happening all over the place, but if it happens at all, it's an abuse of power. Right. The guy Daniel Solov and his Why Privacy Matters article, he makes the point that even if you do have nothing to hide or whatever, if everybody has a dossier, if everybody has some sort of file, and if you ever do decide to, say, speak out against tyranny or the EPA or whatever,

they can say, hey, we've got this fellowmaker over here, what file do you have on them? And all of this stuff, whether it's in context or not, can all be pieced together to look however they want it to look, and all of a sudden, you suddenly lose your conviction. Like that's, the NSA is at the least in danger of having so much information that it can't possibly keep track of everything. At worst, it's setting up the foundation for a tyrannical government that by its very definition in nature, and the capability that it has can't be anything but tyrannical. Even if it tried not to be tyrannical, it couldn't with this capability.

Yeah, and they literally will install something called fiber optic splitters at communications hubs. It has to be under the compliance of these companies, like they're not breaking in there and doing it. There's no way. This is a revelation that came out before Snowden. There was a guy by the last name of a client who was an AT&T engineer in San Francisco. And he found this, this is in the United States of Secrets.

He found this cable going up from one of the, I guess, main routers. Of course that going. Yeah. And he went and looked on the schematics and he's like, wait, there's not supposed to be a room above there, but there's a cable going to a room that's not on the blueprints for this building. So he started looking and what he found was the splitter that you were talking about where it takes the, if the communication line is a beam of light on a fiber optic cable, it

uses a mirror to make a copy of it and split it in two. And one goes to the intended recipient. The other goes to the NSA. Yeah. And that could be your information or your life or your phone call, your email, whatever. Yeah. How about this? They will intercept hardware like a router servers and retrofit them to serve their purposes,

factory seal it and send it right back to be sold. Yeah. So it is pre pre bugged for your convenience. Right. They, they rerout it from the distribution chain without the person who ordered it from like Hula Packard or whoever, knowing that it was intercepted by the NSA and bugged. Well, and because of all of this stuff, there's some people that call Edward Snowden a hero. Some people call him Benedict Arnold and a big fat trader that should never be allowed

back in the country. If he hadn't come out and said this stuff, it would probably all still be going on in secret. Don't you imagine? For sure. I don't think they would have self reported. No. No, they definitely would not have.

I think we're in total agreement on that. So, you know, it's up to listeners out there to decide how you feel about what this guy did. Chuck, there's some other stuff that the NSA did apparently under the auspices of the FISA court. One of the, so it's, it's tasked with eavesdropping on like enemies of the state. It's also crackerjack at getting economic and diplomatic information to people like the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the ambassadors to the UN, people

who deal with the EU. All of these people are bugged by the NSA and we've just recently found out and they've just recently found out and are not very happy about it. In order to give the U.S. information superiority in negotiations. Yeah, that's what I was talking about earlier, like basically using it for political gain has nothing to do with spying on terrorists. Exactly. It's information superiority.

That's the stated aim of the NSA. Collect it all. There's another one too that really like before the internet companies were feeling frustrated that they weren't allowed to talk about these 702 warrant requests. Yeah, that's section 702. Yeah. That's where that comes from. And because in addition to having to give the government this information, you also

can't talk about it at all. There's a gag order associated with it. So the internet companies couldn't say anything in their defense about this. They were still, they were frustrated, but then they felt like a thief had gotten broken into their houses because they found out about this program called Muscular. And Muscular went around the internet companies and went directly to the fiber optic line between Google servers and Yahoo servers and just tapped in and sucked it right out of there and apparently decrypted it fairly easily.

So they're getting information with the complicity of the internet companies and behind the internet companies backs. Yeah. That was a huge surprise. So there's basically like, we have no allegiance whatsoever except to our information collections. Yeah. It seems like there are no rules and safeguards and checks and balances at all. I'm interested to see what happens in the coming years.

My guess is that Snowden's revelations will become obsolete and unimportant and that things will kind of go back to normal. I hope they never become unimportant. I hope what you're saying isn't right. I know that Snowden initially feared to him, as he said, the worst thing that could happen is that if he did this, he took all these risks and exposed all this and nobody cared. That clearly didn't happen, but there's this second potential problem, which is that eventually people just become fatigued from all of this exposure to all of this information that you're

just like, okay, I get it. My life is not my own. Yeah, yeah. I can't take worrying about this anymore, so I'm just going to detach and not care. Right. That, I hope, doesn't happen. I think the vast majority of people don't care. That's crazy to me.

I know. Again, yeah, I agree with you. You can feel about Snowden however you feel, but the concept of being snooped on, regardless of your political affiliation or anything like that, yeah, it's not supposed to be that way here. That transcends like anything, like how do you not care at least? That's crazy to me. There's just like, this would be an 18 hour episode if we went and all this stuff that

NSA did. Sure. But if you like this, go look up the required reading and you'll find plenty of other stuff out there on everything you want to know about the NSA these days. It's all out there, about all 2% of it. You can also learn more about the NSA by typing NSA into the search bar, howstuffworks.com, and that will bring up this fine article. Since I said search bar, it's time for Listener Man.

I'm going to call this a bit on trickling down. Hey guys, wanted to write in with a clarification on the episode on trickle down economics. At one point, you guys use an example of someone working not thinking it is so worth it to get a promotion so it could push you into a higher tax bracket, and thus you are barely bringing home any more money. I had to write in because as someone who loves maths, I absolutely hate to see this misperception of how our taxes work. I've heard people I work with claim the same thing, thinking that getting a $500 bonus

could push them over a line and all of a sudden they would bring home less money than before. I want to state for the record, I know this, we're just giving a different example. That wasn't fully fleshed out. This is completely wrong based on how the tax structure works. Even if you make $1 million a year, the first 9,000 will be based at 10%. The next 28,000 will be based at 15%. The next at 52,000 at 25% and so on. I think you guys know this since you kind of allude to it in other places, but I was

hoping you could make it perfectly clear so those people who might be mistaken realizing that making more will never push all of your income into a higher tax bracket. If you make, for example, $36,000, you'll be in that 15% bracket, and if you get a raise to $40,000 in the 25% bracket, you will only be paying 25% on the $3,100 above that bracket line. The same is true of Josh's claim of the richest people in the U.S. used to pay 90% true, but they only paid 90% on the amount over the previous bracket. Right, but let's say the previous bracket ends at half a million, and then the next-

And you made $50 million. No, you made another half a million, and it was taxed at 90%. That's a disincentive to work. That's what we were saying. I think we could have been clear on how it worked though. I am sure we could have. Anyways, thanks for what you do, and that is from Charity. Thanks a lot, Charity, for clarifying.

We appreciate it. If you have a clarification for us for anything, we want to hear from you. You can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can join us on facebook.com. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com, and as always, join us at our home on the web, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want

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From the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.