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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25652 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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Charitably, your comment is acknowledging that there is a difference between the CDR program and the program that collected the contents of internet communications. Moreover, your comment acknowledges that this conversation is about the program that collected the contents of internet communications. To all of this, I agree.

Now, you're telling me that you've read the PCLOB report on the program that collected the contents of internet communications, the program that is the subject of this conversation, and you can't find anything about specific selection terms in it?

Charitably, your comment is acknowledging that there is a difference between the CDR program and the program that collected the contents of internet communications.

Yes, those are obviously two different programs. The CDR program was actually revealed slightly before the big Snowden reveal, though I believe it turned out Snowden was the source of the earlier leak as well.

The NSA was tapping the communications between datacenters of Internet providers, and by doing so they obtained access to all such communications. Any filtering they did according to selectors was done AFTER they had the data.

Now, you're telling me that you've read the PCLOB report on the program that collected the contents of internet communications, the program that is the subject of this conversation, and you can't find anything about specific selection terms in it?

EDIT: Remember, you had said that the role was, "Nothing".

The report on internet communications does not appear to use the specific term "specific selection terms". The report on CDR data does.

ROFL. You got me. Oh boy, did you get me. It uses the term "specific selectors" and often just the unqualified "selector" to refer to them. I see just how much you weigh being intentionally obtuse versus actually understanding how things work.

So now that we've all had a little laugh, perhaps you could now describe what you think specific selectors are and what their role is in the program? And perhaps try to be serious this time, moving the conversation toward a shared understanding of how the world works.

If "specific selection term" is a term of art, the specific wording matters. This is the government we're talking about here.

My understanding is that the NSA would use the selectors to determine which accounts they would retain information for. But to do that they needed to first obtain everything to do the selection.

Please find that part in the document. It appears that you have not yet read the document. We've made progress in that it seems that you have found it... but you haven't read it.

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