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

theguardian.com

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

#71

Post by keithpeter »

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…

I'm wondering if the large scale data gathering (and I take your point about the organisation perhaps not being able to process all the data it has) is actually detracting from more focused action on appropriate targets, i.e. actual enemies of the state who represent a real and present danger of death or injury?

I've witnessed the assumptions that senior managers sometimes make in medium to large organisations that what they call 'IT' will somehow improve things or answer vital questions when in fact it is the observation of a business process with steps in detail that is needed to find the bottlenecks.

Perhaps I'm being cynical but the 'selling' of large volume data collection (even if a lot of that data has no predictive value and remains static on the hard drives in the data centre) to the politicians might be seen as guaranteeing budget.

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

#72

Post by SamReidHughes »

araes wrote: post #68
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.

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 /…

You can compress human speech while maintaining intelligibility much tighter than 128 kbps.

And did you seriously make a link to cite that 128 kb * 60 = 0.94 MB?

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

#73

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

opendais wrote: post #62
rolux wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

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

Yes! Absolutely! That's the worst-case. It means that the likes of Keith Alexander and James Clapper (and others who they may be in cooperation with) get to choose the government (to a degree sufficient to suit their needs).

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

#76

Post by sp332 »

araes wrote: post #68
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.

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 /…

Your compression numbers are way off. 128kbps is for stereo music, not monaural voice recordings. If you stick with MP3, you can go down to 32 or 24 kbps without sacrificing any intelligibility. If you use a real voice codec like G.729, you can easily get by with 8 kbps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.729

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

#77

Post by jstultz »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #72
araes wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 /…

You can compress human speech while maintaining intelligibility much tighter than 128 kbps. And did you seriously make a link to cite that 128 kb * 60 = 0.94 MB?

No, he made a link to cite that 128 kb * 60 / 8 = 0.94 MB

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

#78

Post by sp332 »

XorNot wrote: post #66
sp332 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

"The National Security Agency has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic (and international) phone calls from two or more target countries as of 2013." That seems like more than just satellite calls.

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

#80

Post by schoen »

disputin wrote: post #67
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?

The UK has the Open Rights Group and Privacy International. (ORG is focused on the UK, while PI is based in the UK but not solely focused on it.)

http://openrightsgroup.org/ https://privacyinternational.org/

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