Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
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Re: Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
#2The more data they have the less they know. Most people with extreme voiced opinions will do nothing. Thinking doesn't mean doing and doing doesn't mean thinking.
Re: Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
#3My recollection of the NSA's legal interpretation is that they feel they don't need a warrant to record everyone's traffic; they only need a warrant for a human to subsequently access those recordings.
The twist this puts on "having nothing to hide" is that it means you have to trust everything you say now will forever be considered benign, rather than just at this particular moment in history.
Open Whisper Systems is a project I work on to help untap your phone: http://www.whispersystems.org
Re: Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
#4The more data they have the less they know. Most people with extreme voiced opinions will do nothing. Thinking doesn't mean doing and doing doesn't mean thinking.
The problem is that if you ever cross them, they have over 10 years worth of every type of your electronic communications to sift through for dirt. Not only do they have all that on you, which gives them some unknown but extremely worrisome level of insight about you, but also on all your friends and family and colleagues. And the likelihood of crossing them keeps growing.
Re: Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
#5The more data they have the less they know. Most people with extreme voiced opinions will do nothing. Thinking doesn't mean doing and doing doesn't mean thinking.
The more data they have, the easier it is for mistakes to occur, the easier it is for those mistakes to affect people detrimentally.
Re: Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
#6This thing is always coming up, will someone show me some actual evidence and I am not talking some crack pot agent turned whistle blower saying "THAT DO THIS AND THAT", not ECHELON and not the base they are building. I am talking evidence. Logging every single thing? Everything? The data storage that would be required for that is insane. All of these "whistle blowers" have something in common, they are making money off of this, from books to interviews. I am not about to trust them any more than I am their previous employers. Why is it I am ment to question everything the US does but I am ment to blindly trust anyone who says they are doing something like this?
Re: Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
#7If the government is already recording everything, why do they have to reach out and reprogram cards to get access to specific people? [1] I think the illegal things the government does to get more access is evidence they don't have total access at this time.
[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/verizon-rigmaiden-a...
Re: Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
#8My recollection of the NSA's legal interpretation is that they feel they don't need a warrant to record everyone's traffic; they only need a warrant for a human to subsequently access those recordings. The twist this puts on "having nothing to hide" is that it means you have to trust everything you say now will forever be considered benign, rather than just at this particular moment in history. Open Whisper Systems i…
It's not a completely ridiculous legal interpretation. The 4th amendment is implemented via the exclusionary rule, which excludes evidence from a court case obtained from an unreasonable search. As a matter of history and practice (the exclusionary rule predates the Constitution), the 4th amendment is in many ways a rule governing criminal procedure more than it is a privacy rule per se.
Now, today the prevailing view is that the 4th amendment is that illegal searches are unconstitutional even if the exclusionary rule can't be invoked (see, Bivens v. Six Unknown Named FBI Agents), but there is still this contour in the law that distinguishes collecting data from trying to bring it into evidence.
The argument here is probably wrong, but not ridiculous.
Re: Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
#9I kind of doubt that they have every phone conversation recorded and archived for all time. But I'm not sure what exactly the incentive is to tell people that they do. If they said, "no, we can't get any of that", it would encourage criminals to be sloppy (and us citizens to not scrutinize them too much). But they say, "yeah, we have everything", which encourages the criminals to use strong cryptography. (And if they've broken AES, they're probably not going to publicly reveal that to our enemies by using it against you in your drug possession case.)
It just doesn't make much sense.
Re: Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
#10The first question that comes to my mind - is this technically and economically possible?
How many minutes does the average person spend on the phone per day? I found some numbers in the range from 6 to 28 minutes per day. Let's just pick 15 minutes. This times the population of the states (313.9 million) divided by two yields 39,237,500 hours per day. Storing this at 8 kbps requires about 128.5 TiB per day or 45.8 PiB per year.
At $40 per TiB this is less than 2 million dollars per year. So technically and economically this should actually be possible. But that is just storing. Performing speech recognition, analyzing the data and extracting information is probably the much harder task and I would guess that it is still infeasible to do this with all phone calls.