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NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

reuters.com

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Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#131

Post by plouc »

jMyles wrote: post #115
mk89 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your comment is meant to be sarcastic, then I am failing to see it... Could you explain what you mean by enslaving as prisoner? So you would let a rapist free or what?

No no, I'm just pointing out that the 13th amendment to the Constitution didn't outlaw slavery entirely, but instead a clause literally beginning with the word "except" - can you imagine? "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except ..." It's candor and obfuscation at the very same time. Here's the rest of the text: "...as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist with…

That doesn't seem to be true at all: Wikipedia says there was around 4 million slaves in the 1860 census while the total number of incarcerated Americans in 2010 doesnt reach 2.5 millions.

Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#132

Post by drb91 »

BookmarkSaver wrote: post #59
scrumption wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mass shootings have tripled since 2011.

This entire thread is proof that people will vehemently spout opinions on topics that they don't even have the slightest understanding of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency Try reading literally just the first paragraph.

Terrorism is the justification for recent astronomical military/defense budgets. It is a convenient basis for infinite war and surveillance; it is conveniently poorly defined. At face value, the people generating the most domestic terror appear to be the politicians and internet trolls....

Even if you accept and desire the NSA for the purposes of sigint, it makes no sense to pretend they can combat terrorism any better than any human can. They should stick to nation states. That we can’t easily discern whether or not they are spying on US citizens should be a red flag, even to lovers of spy games.

Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#133

Post by lern_too_spel »

sterlind wrote: post #89

The NSA plays the "Kevin Bacon" game, where selectors target an individual, their friends, friends of friends (2 degrees of separation out, iirc.) I suspect they're performing a full-take of the call contents as well, just not through the PINWALE/MARINA ingestion system. It's likely commingled with bulk traffic snarfed up by beam splitters at the telcos' NOCs, and separated on-demand from the TEMPORA buffer. At this…

> I suspect they're performing a full-take of the call contents as well, just not through the PINWALE/MARINA ingestion system.

What is the basis for this suspicion? If it were true, that's what people would have reported on from Snowden's millions of leaked documents instead of simply metadata (call data records).

Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#134

Post by lern_too_spel »

jancsika wrote: post #90
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With 300M people in the US? Of them, at least 250M have phones, so... two calls per person per year? (Double it if both ends of the conversation are in the US.) I'm going to guess that the average is more like four calls per day than four calls per year, so... maybe 0.3% of calls? That's far too many. And yet, it's still a very long way from blanket surveillance.

> That's far too many. Quick clarification of what's being discussed here-- What AnimalMuppet has estimated is that someone or some group in the Dept. of Defense has made a request to analyze call metadata, the sum total of which may come to 0.3% of all calls. In other words, that 0.3% reflects the data that has been parsed into a form intelligible for someone or some group working at (or perhaps even sub-contracted…

> The amount of call metadata that is available to the NSA for such requests (available either through one of their monstrously large data centers like the one in Utah, or available through one of their many programs that automate access to private companies' metadata) is almost certainly quite close to 100%.

This is false. Before Obama, they requested and received all call metadata. After Obama, they no longer receive that data. This article is about the number of call records sent to the NSA from the telecoms.

Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#135

Post by stonepresto »

gdsdfe wrote: post #22

If it's collecting this much stuff why not be useful and stop all these annoying phone scammers!

I don't think they have the authority to stop a private company's service (verizon, etc.). Also, they don't monitor the calls themselves, so it would be impossible to tell if it was a scammer until someone reported it, and blacklisting one-by-one will never be effective since they can just change the number.

Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#136

Post by lern_too_spel »

mkempe wrote: post #20

Does "collected" mean that these calls have been searched for criminal or terrorist activity? I recall that Clapper --or someone like him-- was using that distinction in order to claim that the NSA wasn't "collecting" the phone calls of US citizens. edit: ah yes, it was Clapper; to Congress, in 2013. [1] [1] https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/lawmakers-re...

No, it means this is the number of records they got from the telecoms.

Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#137

Post by jMyles »

plouc wrote: post #131
jMyles wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No no, I'm just pointing out that the 13th amendment to the Constitution didn't outlaw slavery entirely, but instead a clause literally beginning with the word "except" - can you imagine? "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except ..." It's candor and obfuscation at the very same time. Here's the rest of the text: "...as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist with…

That doesn't seem to be true at all: Wikipedia says there was around 4 million slaves in the 1860 census while the total number of incarcerated Americans in 2010 doesnt reach 2.5 millions.

I didn't say total slaves vs. total prisoners - I said black men.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/12/michelle-alexander...

edit: I can't imagine why I'm being downvoted here. My statement was utterly correct, and when challenged I cited a credible source. What'd I do wrong?!

Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#138

Post by lern_too_spel »

scrumption wrote: post #68
BookmarkSaver wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This entire thread is proof that people will vehemently spout opinions on topics that they don't even have the slightest understanding of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency Try reading literally just the first paragraph.

Thanks for that reputable source -- but I'm still missing your implication. Do you mean to say that the NSA is primarily concerned with foreign intelligence rather than combating domestic terrorism? Then why so much domestic spying, the entire point of this conversation thread? Furthermore, are you trying to tell me you think they've done a good job in their counterintelligence work? Honestly, given what we have obse…

> Then why so much domestic spying, the entire point of this conversation thread?

The estimates in this thread are that they received .3% or less of all call metadata in the US, which is probably a generous overestimate since the article says the full call records are "billions ... per day." Of that, they query less. I don't know how this can be considered "so much" domestic surveillance.

Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#139

Post by jMyles »

mk89 wrote: post #125
jMyles wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No no, I'm just pointing out that the 13th amendment to the Constitution didn't outlaw slavery entirely, but instead a clause literally beginning with the word "except" - can you imagine? "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except ..." It's candor and obfuscation at the very same time. Here's the rest of the text: "...as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist with…

The concept of prison the way we intend it is relatively new (let's say a couple of hundred years). So I am not surprised to see that there are still some references to slavery here and there, because that was actually the punishment back then. The reason we have more blacks than white in prison is for dozens reasons: - legacy - cultural differences - social injustice Etc. Don't solve problems, ignore them, expect th…

I don't think a single iota of the prison disparity - not one - is attributable to "cultural differences". I also don't think that it is an accident. Drug prohibition was designed precisely - and initially sold expressly - as a way to control black and asian people, and later other people of color.

> Don't solve problems, ignore them, expect that people behave the way you want, wait until someone screws up here and here, let it escalate, ignore again and/or apply short term solutions, mix all this stuff, fast forward all of it, and you have the current situation.

I think that's pretty reasonable. That's pretty much the point I was trying to make about intelligence agencies as well.

Re: NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report

#140

Post by lern_too_spel »

anoncoward778 wrote: post #17

Automatically collecting everyone's cell phone data, has software automatically installed in Smart TV's everywhere, monitors your online footprint (emails, social media[of course]). All those warning from Snowden all those secret software reveals from wikileaks an untold amount of funding from congress with virtually no oversight. And yet tons of bad things keep happening to regular citizens in the US. What exactly d…

Automatically collecting everyone's cell phone data, has software automatically installed in Smart TV's everywhere, monitors your online footprint (emails, social media[of course]).

According to all the documents published so far, the NSA does none of these except monitoring public social media posts.

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