Most people don't realize that the NSA is about ten times larger than the CIA. This allows them to aggregate data on a scale that is unprecedented. Being such a large organization, they still don't have the manpower to process so much data. Thus, the solution is to acquire and store this data for future use. I would imagine that even they don't know exactly what they have.
NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
331–340 of 407 posts
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#332Since the modus operandi seems to be for the NSA to suck up everything it can and decide later it seems (wild speculation follows) that the NSA might be sitting on audio recrodings of all your phone calls for the past several years. Can you imagine the number of divorce cases that would impact? Civil lawsuits? Proof of innocence or guilt in a crime? Hell, get a decade or two of this and historians alone would have a…
Having just watched yesterday's RealTime (Bill Maher's show) as well as the mainstream news coverage of the week, I have finally come to the conclusion that no significant number of Americans has a problem with living in a surveillance state, not even the host and guests on a faux liberal talk show. Except when I'm on HN, everywhere I go there just are no people who see anything fundamentally wrong with the entire pr…
Few men want to be free; most just want fair masters.
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do not stereotype teenagers. I am merely fifteen years old, and if you take a look through my comment thread you may find more insight than you expected. Yes, most in my generation are shallow and passive; but that doesn't mean all are. There are some intellectuals on the fringes.
I'm 16. I agree with the second statement, but I'd like to point out this: if you're in the public school system and you aren't "shallow and passive", chances are good you'll be given hell if you show it. (Or maybe it's just me. I don't know.) I'm new to the public school system this year. I live in an area that has no shortage of gun ownership and advocacy, and, the weekend after Sandy Hook, I went to the guidance o…
That sucks, I'm sorry to hear that, but I'll make an observation and you can take it or leave it: You didn't properly evaluate their position and what is expected of them. They are held to a certain standard they may personally disagree with but their careers are on the line. Students have a hard time realizing this.
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#334Since the modus operandi seems to be for the NSA to suck up everything it can and decide later it seems (wild speculation follows) that the NSA might be sitting on audio recrodings of all your phone calls for the past several years. Can you imagine the number of divorce cases that would impact? Civil lawsuits? Proof of innocence or guilt in a crime? Hell, get a decade or two of this and historians alone would have a…
Having just watched yesterday's RealTime (Bill Maher's show) as well as the mainstream news coverage of the week, I have finally come to the conclusion that no significant number of Americans has a problem with living in a surveillance state, not even the host and guests on a faux liberal talk show. Except when I'm on HN, everywhere I go there just are no people who see anything fundamentally wrong with the entire pr…
Bill Maher has a vested interest in seeing Obama not be made a fool.
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm 20 now, and I think I'm smart. When I was 15 I did as well, but now I think I was pretty stupid at the time. No doubt the pattern will continue at 25.
I hated most literature when I was 18, then magically fell in love with the same novels I hated when I was 24. Still, there is more nuance I can pick up now at 30 with more study of history. If you haven't read the Iliad and a majority of the Bible, then you simply can't understand most of Western literature and those things take time. It's interesting to see that this is a universal experience. School gave me litera…
my 15-22 year-old selves would never forgive me for the types of music I occasionally enjoy to listen to, now.
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recall some months ago a seemingly fairly technical and generally informed commenter -- here on HN, I believe -- laying out their back of the envelop calculation of what it might take to archive all the U.S. voice traffic. The resulting figures were currently readily achievable, and they became increasingly... "trivial" (my interpretation) with the already announced and in progress data center expansions. And here,…
A phone call can be compressed to 10 kbits/sec or less given a good speech codec and still be understandable, if not of very good quality. That means that if you are on the phone 20 minutes every day, it will be around a half a GB per year. If every American is on phone that much, it will be bit less than 143 petabytes a year, or about 36000 4GB hardisks. That is a bit, but the datacenter in Utah presumably have a ca…
The "yottabyte" estimate is absurd, but individual scientific computing centers have about half an exabyte of storage, so the NSA wouldn't have the slightest trouble storing a few exabytes (some GBs per person per year).
In contrast, total IP traffic is in the tens of exabytes per month [1], but much of it is re-transmission of content such as movies, that the NSA is not interested in storing. I wonder what sort of steganography detection they have in place.
[1] http://www.cisco.com/en/US/solutions/collateral/ns341/ns525/...
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#337There's something sick and wrong in the semantics of how the laws have been interpreted here. The authorities seem to have decided that they can record anything they want, any time they want. The legal boundary is only crossed when somebody listens to the recording. So it is fine for them to slurp up every bit of data they can tap into and then retrospectively figure out which bits they were authorized to listen to (…
We need to hear what the NSAs version of listening is. Do algorithms parsing streams count as listening? Or only when a human sees it/hears it?
What about, it's observed when its wave function collapses :-P
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#338You know spys... a bunch of bitchy little girls...
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
You may not be interested in a semantic argument, but it's a semantic point you're arguing. The title of the article in question[1] is: "NSA Prism program taps in to user data of Apple, Google and others • Top-secret Prism program claims direct access to servers of firms including Google, Apple and Facebook • Companies deny any knowledge of program in operation since 2007" The first sentence states: "The National Sec…
> The slides say the NSA can "collect data directly from the servers" of these companies. Guardian states the the slides state that the NSA can collect data directly from the servers of these companies. The slides do say the NSA can "collect data directly from the servers" of these companies. (Well, they say that the NSA uses "collection directly from the servers" of these companies, to get the quotation exactly righ…
Where exactly did the Guardian or Greenwald claim the NSA has root access on servers? I haven't seen that anywhere? Please supply a quote of the part of an article you're referring to so we can make up our own minds about what was said.
It's quite possible Guardian journalists and editors summarised some points in a sloppy way due to lack of understanding (in particular using direct access instead of directly from), but the broad thrust of everything I've read from them has been surprisingly accurate (as journalism goes), and Snowden's claim to have access to any account at will (given enough clearance) is now sounding far more plausible after these recent revelations that calls recorded and can be accessed without a warrant by any agent with the clearance to do so, and according to cnet, perhaps emails too. To an analyst asking for calls/emails, this would seem very much like 'direct and unilateral access', even if from google's end they only respond to lawful orders and don't allow universal tapping as the phone companies do.
I'm surprised that people are talking up minor quibbles over the interpretation of one slide as if all debate hinges on them given the scale of the surveillance which has been exposed. We don't know for sure exactly how the PRISM process works, and what matters is not the process but the legal safegaurds in place (or lack of them), and the extent of surveillance. Why not debate facts we do know and have confirmed?
Re: NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
"and the Guardian walked the claim back" No they didn't. "The Guardian has not revised any of our articles and, to my knowledge, has no intention to do so. That's because we did not claim that the NSA document alleging direct collection from the servers was true; we reported - accurately - that the NSA document claims that the program allows direct collection from the companies' servers. Before publishing, we went to…
I'm not interested in the semantic argument. Emily Bazelon called The Guardian out this week on the Slate political podcast, as have many others; this is now a mainstream criticism of how The Guardian reported the story. Either way: the original notion that NSA had direct access to the servers that actually operate Google Mail has been found to be unsupported by the evidence published thus far. I call this out contin…
> I call this out continuously and obnoxiously on HN because it is very much not the mainstream view on HN; most of the people commenting on the NSA story on HN say things that make it clear that they believe NSA continues to have the direct access to Google's systems that Google and the Guardian say they do not have.
Ah, I was wondering why you were doing this.
Personally I prefer to believe, when it is hinted that the NSA might have access to my emails, that this is true and later be proven wrong (which IMO hasn't been done conclusively yet), rather than the other way around: assuming everything is fine, and then piece by piece being proven wrong as more evidence trickles in.
Note that the above is a hypothetical example, since, being a EU citizen, I already know for a couple of months that the NSA in fact does have the ability to request any of my data without a warrant, given that it resides on a US server.
... Come to think of it, could it be that also influences your perception of what is "the mainstream view" on HN? A lot of people do not explicitly state they are not US-citizens every time they mention how upset they are the NSA can read their emails.