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NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

washingtonpost.com

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Re: NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

#41

Post by res0nat0r »

cracell wrote: post #19
res0nat0r wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evidence?

The article is evidence of the capability. And if you look at other leaks you see a clear pattern of them vacuuming up all the data they possibly can. Then take into consideration their budget and various data centers and it seems that they are capable of doing this at any scale desired. So they've shown the desire and capability. It's not direct evidence but it's pretty strong.

Sure, but collecting and recording phone calls of US citizens is illegal and there hasn't been any evidence of this happening. Metadata of who you called and when has never been protected by the 4th Amendment so we can head that off...

Re: NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

#42

Post by [deleted] »

wreegab wrote: post #40
rdtsc wrote: post #12

Read foreign country as US here too. Basically they can record everything and a constitutionally defined "search" doesn't occur unless a human search and looks at the information. Binney and other were talking about this even long before Snowden. So what happens now, everything you do gets recorded, stored in their data center and kept for decades. As soon as you do anything they deem suspicious they might find you d…

> Read foreign country as US here too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHhVhud8_kE

[deleted]

Re: NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

#43

Post by shill »

rootuid wrote: post #2

"At the request of U.S. officials, The Washington Post is withholding details that could be used to identify the country where the system is being employed or other countries where its use was envisioned" Therefore there is no point to the article.

Pretend that it is Pakistan.

Re: NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

#44

Post by effdee »

samstave wrote: post #14
rdtsc wrote: post #12

Read foreign country as US here too. Basically they can record everything and a constitutionally defined "search" doesn't occur unless a human search and looks at the information. Binney and other were talking about this even long before Snowden. So what happens now, everything you do gets recorded, stored in their data center and kept for decades. As soon as you do anything they deem suspicious they might find you d…

Echelon and Carnivore. We have been talking about this since the 80s....

There have also been rumors about Amdocs [1] being kind of the Israeli counterpart. They do billing for telcos (i.e. determine who talked to whom for how long). The list of their customers is quite impressive.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdocs

Re: NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

#45

Post by bigiain »

res0nat0r wrote: post #41
cracell wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is evidence of the capability. And if you look at other leaks you see a clear pattern of them vacuuming up all the data they possibly can. Then take into consideration their budget and various data centers and it seems that they are capable of doing this at any scale desired. So they've shown the desire and capability. It's not direct evidence but it's pretty strong.

Sure, but collecting and recording phone calls of US citizens is illegal and there hasn't been any evidence of this happening. Metadata of who you called and when has never been protected by the 4th Amendment so we can head that off...

"Illegal" in the same way that saying "No" to congress when the real answer was "Yes" is. Then later explaining that iw was "the least possible untruthful answer".

The NSA have twisted their use of language - to try and claim that "recording phone calls of US citizens" isn't an illegal act until a human being listens to one of those recordings.

I'm 99.999% sure that a "jury of peers" would not interpret the law that way. (Which might be why the need "special courts" without juries…)

Re: NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

#46

Post by glitchdout »

res0nat0r wrote: post #16
rdtsc wrote: post #12

Read foreign country as US here too. Basically they can record everything and a constitutionally defined "search" doesn't occur unless a human search and looks at the information. Binney and other were talking about this even long before Snowden. So what happens now, everything you do gets recorded, stored in their data center and kept for decades. As soon as you do anything they deem suspicious they might find you d…

Evidence?

Here's your fucking evidence:

The FBI had access to the Boston bombers phone calls.

* http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs-july-dec1... (important part at 2:10)

* http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telepho...

I'll quote the slip up of Tim Clemente, a former FBI agent:

> All digital communications are uh uh... There's a way to look at digital communications in the past. And I can't go into detail of how that's done or what's done but I can tell you that no digital communication is secure.

Re: NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

#47

Post by res0nat0r »

bigiain wrote: post #45
res0nat0r wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but collecting and recording phone calls of US citizens is illegal and there hasn't been any evidence of this happening. Metadata of who you called and when has never been protected by the 4th Amendment so we can head that off...

"Illegal" in the same way that saying "No" to congress when the real answer was "Yes" is. Then later explaining that iw was "the least possible untruthful answer". The NSA have twisted their use of language - to try and claim that "recording phone calls of US citizens" isn't an illegal act until a human being listens to one of those recordings. I'm 99.999% sure that a "jury of peers" would not interpret the law that…

There is no evidence of the NSA recording phone calls of US citizens, that is just speculation.

Re: NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

#48

Post by contingencies »

qwerta wrote: post #24

It says NSA only keeps 1 month of voice records. I think they store everything for couple of years, perhaps indefinitely. Storing all that voice is very cheap and is too juicy to let go. Also there were rumors about this recording for the past 30 years. GSM voice codec has rate 13 kbit/s. 6 billion people x 1 hour of talking per day = 6e9 x 3600 x 13/8 = 35 TB/day .

GSM voice codec has rate 13 kbit/s.

Wasn't there a story very recently about new voice compression bringing voice storage down by 30%? I'm not even sure GSM was the go-to beforehand. So I'd say, halve that estimate and you're ballpark current.

6 billion people x 1 hour of talking per day = 6e9 x 3600 x 13/8 = 35 TB/day

I'd say most places more like 15 minutes per person as a maximum average, generally even less. That means 4.3TB/day. Which is only a couple of $200 hard disks, or four if you want RAID1.

Re: NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

#49

Post by contingencies »

effdee wrote: post #44
samstave wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Echelon and Carnivore. We have been talking about this since the 80s....

There have also been rumors about Amdocs [1] being kind of the Israeli counterpart. They do billing for telcos (i.e. determine who talked to whom for how long). The list of their customers is quite impressive. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdocs

These 'rumours' are more like an open secret inside the industry.

Personally I have seen billing APIs at AT&T (US) and T-Mobile (US) which are semi-equivalent. For one of those, calls go straight to an Amdocs domain on an AS hosted outside of the carrier. Of course, few people will see these now since Google Play canned external billing APIs (removing most of the interest here) and most new projects choose to access carrier billing via international aggregators (since integrating with one carrier can take months of pain, if you even have enough of a case to bother, and if they even talk to you). For NFC stuff, most US carriers are combining forces to produce a new API which will effectively similarly distance any integrators. The reason I got a look was we were developing the flagship app for Samsung Galaxy series device launch in the US, and the carriers were all on board with it.

An older, long term IT veteran friend of mine who recently retired in Australia and chaired the mobile phone number portability multi-carrier technical implementation roundtable told me he was essentially fired (contract not renewed) for opening up an inquiry in to the wasteful billing practices at one particular Australian carrier. It turned out they were using Amdocs. He described making a decision, being forced to sit through a presentation, making the same decision, being forced to sit through another presentation, until the end of this contract period.

This and other sources concur: the Amdocs billing stuff's like cancer. Once they're in your network, you can't get rid of them. If I were a national privacy authority or the European Data Protection Supervisor, I'd walk in to all my carriers, seize all third party billing systems, dump out disk images, and analyze them top to bottom in a nationally transparent, multi-party audit citing national security / privacy.

Re: NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

#50

Post by rbcgerard »

res0nat0r wrote: post #47
bigiain wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Illegal" in the same way that saying "No" to congress when the real answer was "Yes" is. Then later explaining that iw was "the least possible untruthful answer". The NSA have twisted their use of language - to try and claim that "recording phone calls of US citizens" isn't an illegal act until a human being listens to one of those recordings. I'm 99.999% sure that a "jury of peers" would not interpret the law that…

There is no evidence of the NSA recording phone calls of US citizens, that is just speculation.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence in this case.
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