I call bullshit. Phone metadata is saved since forever yes, but stored at ISPs, not at government organisations. There are strict regulations regarding the privacy of voice data over the phone (VoIP does not count as such though), and I don't think the secret service and military secret service (AIVD and MIVD) can do anything they like. They have more permissions, such as demanding passwords for encrypted files as lo…
I call bullshit. Phone metadata is saved since forever yes, but stored at ISPs, not at government organisations. There are strict regulations regarding the privacy of voice data over the phone (VoIP does not count as such though), and I don't think the secret service and military secret service (AIVD and MIVD) can do anything they like. They have more permissions, such as demanding passwords for encrypted files as lo…
>I call bullshit. Phone metadata is saved since forever yes, but stored at ISPs, not at government organisations. There are strict regulations regarding the privacy of voice data over the phone (VoIP does not count as such though), and I don't think the secret service and military secret service (AIVD and MIVD) can do anything they like. They have more permissions, such as demanding passwords for encrypted files as long as it's not for your own conviction (while normally you have the right to remain silent), but it probably doesn't go that far. Keyword searches are probably not true.
Yes, because secret services have been known to strictly follow the law, and not do anything without telling you first.
I fail to understand why tiny tranquil european countries without serious dangers of terrorism or organized crime even do this. They have nothing to reveal by intrecepting communications, why spend money and public credit on this?
Going off on a tangent, perhaps the Netherlands doesn't have serious terrorism or organized crime /because/ of these measures, quelling them before they even go public?
I call bullshit. Phone metadata is saved since forever yes, but stored at ISPs, not at government organisations. There are strict regulations regarding the privacy of voice data over the phone (VoIP does not count as such though), and I don't think the secret service and military secret service (AIVD and MIVD) can do anything they like. They have more permissions, such as demanding passwords for encrypted files as lo…
I agree this is a bullshit story. They only store conversations when they have an eavesdrop approval. A lot of people underestimate the amount of storage it would take to store all voice data.
Storing voice (audio) data is not what the article says. I'd imagine you transcribe the audio to text and search in that. Storing text is incredibly easy. Besides you can throw away 99.9% of the data almost immediately.
I'm actually curious how much text data this would be per day; number of call minutes * average number of words per minute. I'd be surprised if that wouldn't fit in a reasonable cluster.
I call bullshit. Phone metadata is saved since forever yes, but stored at ISPs, not at government organisations. There are strict regulations regarding the privacy of voice data over the phone (VoIP does not count as such though), and I don't think the secret service and military secret service (AIVD and MIVD) can do anything they like. They have more permissions, such as demanding passwords for encrypted files as lo…
I agree this is a bullshit story. They only store conversations when they have an eavesdrop approval. A lot of people underestimate the amount of storage it would take to store all voice data.
Commercial speech compression algorithms are hamstrung by the need to only add milliseconds of delay: they can only compress over a 'window' of tens of milliseconds. You can almost certainly do a much better job of compressing speech in batches of an minutes or tens of minutes: there is much more redundancy to remove. So if the spooks wanted to store massive amounts of speech data, they may have invested in such algorithms.
I fail to understand why tiny tranquil european countries without serious dangers of terrorism or organized crime even do this. They have nothing to reveal by intrecepting communications, why spend money and public credit on this?
Are you serious? Dutch jihadists are fighting in Syria, the Detroit underwear bomber boarded his plane at Amsterdam Schiphol and organized crime is a serious problem in the Netherlands (see http://www.nokturnis.net/nokwiki/tiki-index.php?page=Organiz... )
I think it goes a bit far to call a couple of nutjobs 'jihadists'. And the fact that someone traveled through one of our airports doesn't mean we have a structural problem.
I call bullshit. Phone metadata is saved since forever yes, but stored at ISPs, not at government organisations. There are strict regulations regarding the privacy of voice data over the phone (VoIP does not count as such though), and I don't think the secret service and military secret service (AIVD and MIVD) can do anything they like. They have more permissions, such as demanding passwords for encrypted files as lo…
The CIOT system can not legally be queried "at will", they have to have permission. Although the bar for this permission is incredibly low, I believe there have been some cases where it was denied.
Of course some government services have blanket permission. Example 1: the (dutch) IRS.
What? So you can have attacks on your country without requiring the world to go into lockdown, without having to invade several countries and without having to molest every traveler?
> without having to molest every traveler Schiphol is organised better than most comparable airports, and it has improved dramatically in the last 5 years, but the level of actual harassment can still be quite high (seems to vary by day).
It's probably the most harassing airport in Europe. I haven't been to all airports but I've been to many (>50) and Shiphol was the worst. Still better than the US though, if you're an EU citizen at least.
ECHELON is a global communications interception system, created by the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand to routinely and indiscriminately monitor and record all forms of electronic communications worldwide both military and civilian and overseen by the National Security Agency. Designed during the cold-war, ECHELON primarily intercepts worldwide non-military communications, including those from governments, organizations, businesses and individuals. It could intercept practically any communication between countries anywhere in the world. The project ECHELON receiving system thieves this streams of millions of communications every hours to massive rez of computers. These computers decrypt messages when necessary, than when required utilize optical character recognition or advanced voice recognition techniques to extract words from each message. Every message captured is analysed for keywords or phrases found in the ECHELON dictionary. Keywords include all the names, places, code words or subjects that might be of interest. There are second search lists for each member country. Messages acquired at any of the receiving posts, containing requested keywords are automatically past on to intelligence organizations requesting those keywords. Those messages are flagged for further analysis. ...and ray of receiving stations collect all international communications carried by approximately 20 INTELSAT satellites. The INTELSATs are used by telephone companies of most countries. Thou they carry primarily civilian traffic, they also carry diplomatic and governmental communications. These INTELSATs are positioned in the stationary orbit around the equator and carry tens of thousands of simultaneous phone-calls, faxes and e-mails.
"De Telegraaf" may not be a reliable source, but even members of parliament are asking questions. Apparently the Dutch government is preparing a massive internet interception program. See: https://www.bof.nl/2013/06/10/nederlandse-overheid-broedt-op.... Sorry, but Google Translate does not translate HTTPS urls.