The Feds have been buying consumer data for decades, this is far from new. This goes back to “junk mail”, pre internet.
As usual the US congress sat by and did nothing, and in all likelihood, will continue to do nothing.
New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
101–110 of 327 posts
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#102Note that this is just records of some of the federal agencies, not all of them, according to the linked ACLU report: > "Although the litigation is ongoing, we are now making public the records that CBP, ICE, the U.S. Secret Service, the U.S. Coast Guard, and several offices within DHS Headquarters have provided us to date." The NSA is still vacuuming up all the metadata and a good fraction of the content from the ma…
Funny thing is, they started the surveillance in late-2001 to suck all the records up. Where did they get the computers and storage devices to do that all at once? They must have been installing equipment for months or years, especially since I am pretty sure they even built a new data center on Fort Mead for it around that time. Now, this is 2001, when building a datacenter didn't just involve spinning up 1000 AWS E…
I recall some natural disaster in Thailand being blamed for a hard drive shortage at the time, when it ended up being the NSA buying them all up for their Utah data center.
Edit: anyone downvoting want to comment on why this is implausible or not noteworthy to mention? It was a topic of discussion at the time.
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#103I'm wondering when citizen vigilante groups will start buying location data from these brokers to solve crimes.
I'm surprised no one has bought location data for prominent Congresspersons and used it to embarrass them into writing up laws around this.
They have.
John Oliver did it this year, and it was f*king great!
https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/last-we...
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny thing is, they started the surveillance in late-2001 to suck all the records up. Where did they get the computers and storage devices to do that all at once? They must have been installing equipment for months or years, especially since I am pretty sure they even built a new data center on Fort Mead for it around that time. Now, this is 2001, when building a datacenter didn't just involve spinning up 1000 AWS E…
I recall some natural disaster in Thailand being blamed for a hard drive shortage at the time, when it ended up being the NSA buying them all up for their Utah data center. Edit: anyone downvoting want to comment on why this is implausible or not noteworthy to mention? It was a topic of discussion at the time.
Source? Would love to hear about this.
I searched for "thailand hard drive shortage nsa" and only got...
2013 Nov, Backblaze's annual hard drive report still only blamed the flooding: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/farming-hard-drives-2-years-a...
2015, Tech Power-Up has a story about NSA malware hidden in hard drive firmware: https://www.techpowerup.com/209925/nsa-hides-spying-backdoor...
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny thing is, they started the surveillance in late-2001 to suck all the records up. Where did they get the computers and storage devices to do that all at once? They must have been installing equipment for months or years, especially since I am pretty sure they even built a new data center on Fort Mead for it around that time. Now, this is 2001, when building a datacenter didn't just involve spinning up 1000 AWS E…
I legit don't believe they can store all that data. Youtube alone creates too much data for them to process and handle. They must be storing either a subset or only partial metadata.
If I was them, I would not back up YouTube, but I might carefully scrape and discard.
Hell, if I was a _benevolent_ surveillance program, I'd probably run routine searches for illegal stuff on YouTube, both to find it myself, and to make sure YouTube's tripwires are working.
There is so much low-hanging fruit in terms of "interesting secrets per byte"
Like, I could believe all SMS messages are stored for a year or so.
Some random source says, "Over 6 billion texts are sent every day".
If a text is about 140 characters, and you use a dumb image classifier to transcribe photos as "Nude woman", "nude man", "dick pic", "image macro", "guns", etc., that's only about 1 TB per day, right?
365 TB to keep all US text messages for a year? Maybe my source is wrong. That sounds low. But, it's just text. Maybe it's right.
In fact, the upper bound for all US keyboard input for a year must be below 4.6 petabytes.
(350 million people typing 365 days a year, 16 hours a day, 40 words per minute, 1 bit of entropy per character after compression, 8 bits per word)
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I legit don't believe they can store all that data. Youtube alone creates too much data for them to process and handle. They must be storing either a subset or only partial metadata.
The NSA has an unlimited budget to store all the data they want. They have massive, billion-dollar data centers around the country (and the world?). The one in Utah is perhaps the best known. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
Nothing is unlimited. If it cut into our tank budget, or anything old retirees care about, something would happen.
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#107What's the name of the phenomena wherein people who once mocked the idea of this occuring now act as if it's obvious and unremarkable?
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recall some natural disaster in Thailand being blamed for a hard drive shortage at the time, when it ended up being the NSA buying them all up for their Utah data center. Edit: anyone downvoting want to comment on why this is implausible or not noteworthy to mention? It was a topic of discussion at the time.
Source? Would love to hear about this. I searched for "thailand hard drive shortage nsa" and only got... 2013 Nov, Backblaze's annual hard drive report still only blamed the flooding: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/farming-hard-drives-2-years-a... 2015, Tech Power-Up has a story about NSA malware hidden in hard drive firmware: https://www.techpowerup.com/209925/nsa-hides-spying-backdoor...
I don't recall where I heard it but found this in a quick search:
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/li1pep/a_global...
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are a surveillance state. We(geeks) all made a fuss over it about 20 years ago and no one seemed to care so here we are. Every so often someone new realizes it, freaks out, and not much changes. I wish I weren't so cynical but at some point I just got tired of losing sleep over it.
The difference is surveillance states have historically leveraged people rather than passive tracking. It’s wildly different knowing your friends, family, even children are being indoctrinated to report you for things that may or may not have happened at which point you just disappear like many people you never heard from again. It’s actively stressful in a way that cellphones just don’t evoke.
Like rabies. Rabies has no symptoms until it's too late. The cellphones and ALPRs and PRISM have no symptoms until they're used.
Stress would be nice. If we felt stressed, we might vote for treatment.
Re: New documents reveal scale of US Government’s cell phone location data tracking
#110This should not be surprising at all ... hope we still remember the Snowden revelation ....