William Binney: 80% of audio calls are recorded and stored in the US • Hacker News Board

Re: William Binney: 80% of audio calls are recorded and stored in the US

#61

Post by nitrogen » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 4:29 PM UTC

_wp3r wrote: post #47

ryanklee wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm interested to hear from those who voted this comment down: Why? The parent's comment, even if disagreeable in some regards, is substantial and the discussion is better for it having been made.

Discussions surrounding threat mitigation and risk mitigation are uniformly one sided on HN, and even the most delicate walk down the line of acceptable mitigation is shunned. The more interesting point is the inverse position of the community in regards to network and systems security, in which all measures of threat mitigation are encouraged or "required".

Discussions of threat mitigation are irrelevant so long as the threats and their countermeasures remain undisclosed. There can be no productive debate when one side knows everything and tells the other side nothing.

It doesn't matter if surveillance is used only for good (evidence suggests otherwise, though); if the surveillance organizations have all the power to operate in secrecy and distort the truth when questioned by the legislature, their "trust us" assurances are wholly untrustworthy.

Re: William Binney: 80% of audio calls are recorded and stored in the US

#62

Post by opendais » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 4:30 PM UTC

rolux wrote: post #50

opendais wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are talking about people attempting to break the law... "The first batch, published a week ago, included a conversation between Marek Belka, the chief of Poland's central bank, and Interior Minister Bartlomiej Sienkiewicz, in which they discussed how the central bank might use its power to help the government win reelection in 2015. Mr. Belka said that his condition for help would be "the dismissal of the finance…

> I'm not sure why you cited... Because such leaks will be used selectively , against anyone the data collecting agencies see as a worthwhile target. And no, blanket recording of all phone calls is not the "valid and good purpose" of the security apparatus, even if it occasionally exposes political corruption.

> Because such leaks will be used selectively, against anyone the data collecting agencies see as a worthwhile target.

So because they don't remove all corrupt officials, just some, its a bad thing.

Okay. I guess I don't really see that as any different as now and is completely unrelated to the quantity of recordings.

> And no, blanket recording of all phone calls is not the "valid and good purpose" of the security apparatus, even if it occasionally exposes political corruption.

That isn't what I said. I said exposing corruption was the valid and good purpose. It had nothing to do with recording all phone calls, merely some conversations in restaurants which is what you were talking about being recorded is a valid and good purpose.

You don't get to just flip flop around and re-arrange the context of the subject you brought up [recording people having private meetings in restaurants involving illegal corruption] and [recording everyone's conversations].

These are two separate things.

Re: William Binney: 80% of audio calls are recorded and stored in the US

#63

Post by joelhaus » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 4:32 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #25

fit2rule wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No: the NSA is recording at least 80% of all calls and will, towards the end of the year, have the capacity to record 100%.

You're assuming that the 20% drop off is due to capacity. That isn't my understanding of the current situation. The Utah facility gives them the ability to store calls for longer, it doesn't increase their scope. The reason they don't record 20% of calls is, from my understanding, that they have internal rules against recording certain people important to the democratic process within the US (e.g. politicians (and th…

They are not allowed to spy on US persons without a warrant. Full stop. The law is quite clear. Further, the court ruled that metadata was exempt from protection because, in part, it was voluntarily handed over to a third party by the end user.

I'd love to hear how you came to your conclusion that only politicians, et. al. enjoy such protections.

Re: William Binney: 80% of audio calls are recorded and stored in the US

#64

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 4:32 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #25

fit2rule wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No: the NSA is recording at least 80% of all calls and will, towards the end of the year, have the capacity to record 100%.

You're assuming that the 20% drop off is due to capacity. That isn't my understanding of the current situation. The Utah facility gives them the ability to store calls for longer, it doesn't increase their scope. The reason they don't record 20% of calls is, from my understanding, that they have internal rules against recording certain people important to the democratic process within the US (e.g. politicians (and th…

[deleted]

Re: William Binney: 80% of audio calls are recorded and stored in the US

#65

Post by nitrogen » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 4:33 PM UTC

eli wrote: post #6

"At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US. This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores." I think he meant that the NSA had access to the 80% of calls that are routed through the US, not the the NSA is recording and storing literally every single one o…

Back then the key words were "echelon" and "carnivore". People had suspicions, IIRC there was an EU inquiry, but only now do we have concrete evidence.

Re: William Binney: 80% of audio calls are recorded and stored in the US

#66

Post by XorNot » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 4:34 PM UTC

sp332 wrote: post #54

XorNot wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither of those two places could be described as having a particularly high volume of calls though. Its an order of magnitude or more difference in sheer volume you'd be looking at.

It's got to be two orders of magnitude easier for them to tap phones in the USA though. They don't have to ingratiate themselves with anyone or hide what they're doing, just show up at AT&T with a FISA-signed warrant and install equipment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A They've had a lot longer to do the work, and they have a lot less distance to transport equipment.

The call in Afghanistan is just satellite calls - those satellites are all US owned. Tapping them is trivial given the very limited number of satellites.

US telecommunications is geographically disperse, and my original point anyway was that the volume of calls is enormous - storing and processing that much data is hardly a trivial problem since it's both storage AND CPU intensive. From the US black ops budget you could make some reasonable estimates as to the total size and capability of the NSA to do this.

Re: William Binney: 80% of audio calls are recorded and stored in the US

#67

Post by disputin » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 4:41 PM UTC

r0h1n wrote: post #11

We're staring at the gradual but deliberate end of privacy and its scary. The large majority of the world's population either doesn't know or care how significant or dangerous this trend is, and those few who do will find their way into surveillance databases because they act "suspiciously" by encrypting their communications and guarding their privacy. I don't see a powerful enough counterforce against this insidious…

Is there a list of counterforces? https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying https://prism-break.org/en/all/ ...

And EFF is NSA centric - is there a UK equivalent? Why are GCHQ getting insignificant heat?

Re: William Binney: 80% of audio calls are recorded and stored in the US

#68

Post by araes » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 4:41 PM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #45

sp332 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NSA is recording every call in the Bahamas and Afghanistan. They can listen to any call made in the last 30 days. (Edit: Only cell phone calls, but still.) It's possible that a similar rolling-window system is in place for calls going through the USA. Bahamas: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/05/19/data-p... Afghanistan: https://wikileaks.org/WikiLeaks-statement-on-the-mass.html

Neither of those two places could be described as having a particularly high volume of calls though. Its an order of magnitude or more difference in sheer volume you'd be looking at.

Well, what would it take to record the whole US? One version says that we make ~5 calls a day on our phones [1] and ownership hovers at 80-90% of the 18+ population (and probably a bunch younger). The US is 311 million, lets say 80% of 300 million, so 240 million people making 5 calls / day.

The average call length is 1.8 minutes right now [2]. So we've got 240 mil person * 5 calls / person-day * 365 days * 1.8 min / call. So, about 788 billion minutes of calls / year at a flow rate of about 2 billion calls / day.

At MP3 compression of 128kbps, vocal data takes about 0.94 MB / minute [3]. So, close to 688 petabytes of storage data at a rate of about 1.9 petabytes / day. Seems within the realm of doable.

The problem of analysing this is in the "ridiculous parallelism" category, so they'd just be constrained by server farm capacity. Lets say they had a system with a conservative million nodes. Each day, each node would have to process ~2 GB of audio data looking for patterns. Not even challenging. If I were clever, I'd probably run a brute force audio to text on each node, then a text to symbol pattern analyser. I'd also have higher level net processes that look for patterns in calls spatially and temporally, but with far less processors.

[1] http://www.pewinternet.org/2010/09/02/cell-phones-and-americ...

[2] http://www.statista.com/statistics/185828/average-local-mobi...

[3] http://iaudiophile.net/forums/archive/index.php/t-2081.html

Re: William Binney: 80% of audio calls are recorded and stored in the US

#69

Post by nitrogen » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 4:42 PM UTC

opendais wrote: post #35

mandalar12 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but, for instance, if you lived under a fascist anti-gay regime and were gay you would hide it very actively. On the opposite gays today, through their correspondances, might be quiet easily spotted by the NSA or anyone with access to their phone calls / mails / texts. Once the regime becomes anti-gay, they will come for you and it is too late to do anything.

So what your saying is you'd be able to destroy all crawlable evidence on the internet and wipe the memories of all your friends and strip out every reference to a "gay bar" or the like from your finances? I think you greatly overestimate how effective people could be in wiping their fingerprints from the internet. There is a reason people talk about once you post something on the internet its out there forever. You…

The parent comment is saying that those things wouldn't be created in the first place if the environment were already hostile to them. You can hide your present to some extent, but not erase the past.

Re: William Binney: 80% of audio calls are recorded and stored in the US

#70

Post by fnordfnordfnord » Fri, Jul 11, 2014, 4:45 PM UTC

MisterWebz wrote: post #56

tokenadult wrote: post #39

The story in the Guardian by Antony Loewenstein certainly reports that William Binney's personal opinion as a former employee of NSA is that NSA is gathering up and recording whatever it can and that NSA has a "totalitarian mentality." That is a very important issue, if true, but it is at least debatable that NSA is really that thorough in its actual practices and really that generally blatant in disregarding the civ…

That is an incredibly weak argument. First of all, whether they are shameless or not doesn't really matter. If sexually explicit pictures of a politician end up on the internet, his reputation takes damage. It's beyond his control. Plenty of politicians are willing to go to great lengths to avoid this. So what does it matter if he's shameless or not? Second of all, politicians and other powerful people might have som…

So glad you mentioned Nacchio.