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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

#81

Post by AlyssaRowan »

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 /…

Here, have a data point: GCHQ had a sub-1kbps voice codec in the mid-80s (it sounds horribly 'squelchy'), and they used tape when they were doing it back then...

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

#82

Post by daswolle »

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 /…

This is cool. Everyone always talks about the idea of recording and analyzing calls, but I've never thought about actual implementation. I appreciate the perspective.

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

#83

Post by fooqux »

hnriot wrote: post #52
mandalar12 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is the next governments will inherit the surveillance system. Who says they won't be fascists and/or turn the country into dictatorship ? When this happens, we might see these mass arrests. A lot can change in only a few decades.

One would hope that the US population wouldn't vote in a party of fascists. And if they did, then they get what they deserve. American voters aren't known for being particularly bright (they voted in a drunk who couldn't put together a complete sentence, twice!) but voting in fascists is a little far fetched.

Obviously their running platform wouldn't be "I'm more of a fascist than the other guy". No, it's probably going to happen like it usually does- somebody gets voted in for being less of a nutjob than their opponent, something bad happens, and the elected official uses that as a excuse for all the horrible policies that follow. It's already happened at least once here with McCarthy; he was just a freakin senator, one of many across the nation.

It almost happened once again with 9/11. Bush basically gutted Habeas Corpus, since he decided that anybody arrested under suspicions of terrorism wasn't allowed the protections afforded under it. The government could arrest you, send you to secret prison, and that would be the end of it since you were never allowed a trial.

True, none of the above examples are true fascism. But, they are scary steps in the right direction. Fear is an excellent political motivator, and with our fear-mongering media we have, that's a more powerful tool than ever. Invent an enemy scary enough, and it seems people will actually hand you their rights while thanking you for it.

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

#84

Post by PavlovsCat »

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…

> It's certainly not beyond the capabilities of the NSA to target powerful people that oppose the NSA while ignoring those that support them.

I had to think something similar when I read this in your parent post:

if NSA is missing major activities of other countries (the Russian intervention in Ukraine) and nonstate terrorist groups (the "Islamic State" capture of much territory in Iraq), then surely NSA doesn't have the time and resources to analyze all of the data it gathers, and maybe it is not gathering as much data as some people claim.

That is, how do we know for a fact the NSA missed this? Could it not also simply have not acted on it, for whatever reasons? E.g. I know on the surface it's in the interest of the US to have "stability" in the Middle East, but even former CIA people have been warning since the buildup to the Iraq war, that some strategies and tactics can lead to more terrorism, more instability. And then exactly that happened, because their warnings were not heeded. Am I to believe that was incompetence? I know this borders on tinfoil terrority, but I really don't mean to outright claim what my questions might imply, I am just wondering and genuinely curious/clueless, I don't read news regularly, so I have no idea what the NSA having no idea about the Ukraine and ISIS stuff is referring to.

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

#85

Post by AlyssaRowan »

dbpokorny wrote: post #74

If this is legal, is legality meaningless?

There are not a lot of things they are not allowed to intercept, and it is very unclear (and classified!) what their interpretation of those rules are.

And then they break them sometimes anyway.

Same with GCHQ, really.

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

#86

Post by AlyssaRowan »

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…

No. Mobile and landlines, too.

Satellite calls have been intercepted worldwide for decades now by numerous intelligence agencies.

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

#87

Post by quesera »

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 /…

Standard POTS audio is a single 3.4kHz bandwidth channel. Compressing VOIP codecs allow a wider range, but still sound great at 12kb/s.

So without any non-COTS tech and without sacrificing the lilt of grandma's sparkly voice, we're already at a 90% reduction of your numbers.

So let's go with 190 TB/day. Say we keep 30 days in hot disk storage, and spool it off to a digital tape robot afterward. We'd need a few thousand COTS hard drives on less than a thousand servers (triple it for decent RAID).

Then a few million-dollar LTO tape libraries, and a couple of guys to schlep tape cartridges all day long.

(Of course, since we don't require all that compute power, and because Gov't doesn't build datacenters like Google does, they'd just buy a few fat IBM z/OS boxes, and a few fat EMC cabinets for low $10's of millions total, and call it a day.)

Either way, it's well within the realm of eminently achievable, I'd say. Which means it's obviously happening. :)

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

#88

Post by voidlogic »

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…

The tragic thing about core human societal issues like this the same issues keep coming back, again and again- Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

The truth is people with uncountable power will use that power unaccountably. I think often the person who gains the power originally isn't an abuser, but rather one of their successors.

The NSA needs accountability. But better yet, is removal of unnecessary power.

It might have sounded like paranoia in the past, but without evidence to the contrary, I will side with history and assume the abuses described above are happening.

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

#89

Post by higherpurpose »

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…

The "shameless" ones are usually working for NSA. The shameless ones don't tend to be the "good guys", but the corrupt/easily compromised and bought politicians.

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

#90

Post by higherpurpose »

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.

And that's where the Utah data center comes in.
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