Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 360 posts

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

#171

Post by dabber »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #140
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.

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

From the first paragraph of the article linked here:

>The U.S. National Security Agency collected 534 million records of phone calls and text messages of Americans last year, more than triple gathered in 2016, a U.S. intelligence agency report released on Friday said.

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

#172

Post by anf »

tptacek wrote: post #108
tptacek wrote: post #62

What's the denominator of that fraction?

The first search result on Google --- surely not accurate --- suggests the numerator is ~2 trillion.

What's a call record? Like a single phone call or an SMS? Pinging the tower doesn't count, does it?

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

#173

Post by newman8r »

jMyles wrote: post #137
plouc wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?!

The article makes the claim for the year 1850, and your claim is for the year 1860. There were more slaves in 1860 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_Census) than in 1850 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1850_United_States_Census)

In 1860 there were 3,953,761 slaves counted in the census.

In 2016, if you count everyone under probation and parole in addition to those in jail and prison, the number is 6,613,500 (https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpus16.pdf)

If you assume 40% of them are black, like the article claims, the number comes out to 2,645,400. This is considerably less than the number of slaves in 1860, or 1850 for that matter.

If you have a source to back up your claim then you should post it. I'm actually curious what sources the author might have been using.

I don't think you're acting in bad faith, I think you just read that huffpost article and assumed it was correct. I just wanted to reply since you were curious about what you might have done wrong.

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

#174

Post by kurczynski »

contourtrails wrote: post #160
jMyles wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?!

They broke laws and are being punished as criminals. Many people of all races are punished in the same way. I think drug laws in this country are way too harsh, but those are the laws. People should not break them if they don't want to be jailed. Also slavery was a human problem for thousands of years, it took humanity collectively waking up to the evils of slavery to abolish it. Human governments the world over supp…

That is the most niave understanding of government and racism.

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

#175

Post by mkempe »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #136
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.

Actually, it means these records have been returned as part of queries.

We know the NSA collects closer to trillions of domestic records (from phone calls to text messages and emails) and brazenly lies about it to Congress.

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

#176

Post by lern_too_spel »

dabber wrote: post #171
lern_too_spel wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>According to all the documents published so far, the NSA does none of these except monitoring public social media posts. From the first paragraph of the article linked here: >The U.S. National Security Agency collected 534 million records of phone calls and text messages of Americans last year, more than triple gathered in 2016, a U.S. intelligence agency report released on Friday said.

That doesn't support any of GGP's statements now, does it? They merely collected the call times and numbers of a tiny fraction of the "billions" of calls placed per day in the US.

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

#177

Post by jMyles »

newman8r wrote: post #173
jMyles wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?!

The article makes the claim for the year 1850, and your claim is for the year 1860. There were more slaves in 1860 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_Census ) than in 1850 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1850_United_States_Census ) In 1860 there were 3,953,761 slaves counted in the census. In 2016, if you count everyone under probation and parole in addition to those in jail and prison, the number is…

Yep, you're right - I was off by a decade.

I initially heard about this not from The New Jim Crow but from this (seemingly awesome) Brown University student:

http://www.politifact.com/rhode-island/statements/2014/dec/0...

...but if I'm doing the math correctly, it appears to hold even for 1860 for adult males.

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

#178

Post by lern_too_spel »

mkempe wrote: post #175
lern_too_spel wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Actually, it means these records have been returned as part of queries. We know the NSA collects closer to trillions of domestic records (from phone calls to text messages and emails) and brazenly lies about it to Congress.

> We know the NSA collects closer to trillions of domestic records (from phone calls to text messages and emails) and brazenly lies about it to Congress.

We know all of that to be false, according to Snowden's documents.

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

#179

Post by contourtrails »

kurczynski wrote: post #174
contourtrails wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They broke laws and are being punished as criminals. Many people of all races are punished in the same way. I think drug laws in this country are way too harsh, but those are the laws. People should not break them if they don't want to be jailed. Also slavery was a human problem for thousands of years, it took humanity collectively waking up to the evils of slavery to abolish it. Human governments the world over supp…

That is the most niave understanding of government and racism.

How so? Economic circumstances negatively impact certain people more than others in the world but how are modern western governments perpetuating racism?

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

#180

Post by lern_too_spel »

Clubber wrote: post #170
lern_too_spel wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is both old (they no longer get all metadata, just the 500 million requested as described in today's article) and contradicts GGP's claim.

I guess we'll just have to wait for another whistleblower to confirm they are lying about it again. At least it isn't "wittingly."

Except they never lied about that according to Snowden's documents. They never recorded all domestic phone calls.
Post reply on HN