NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst • Hacker News Board

Re: NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

#51

Post by northwest » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 10:10 AM UTC

ollysb wrote: post #39

MichaelGG wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uncompressed, 1 hour of phone audio is only ~29MB (8KB/sec*3600s/h). Compressing it for storage can send that way down. Let's assume to 6MB. If every 300M Americans talked for an hour a day, that's only 2TB a day for call audio. Edit: That's only one-way, so double. But compression can eliminate most of that, as there's usually only audio on one side of a call at a time. Anyways, even if I'm right within a factor of…

Wouldn't the information be more useful in text form? Transcripts would take far less space and would probably be necessary for any sort of useful search. They might even call the transcript "meta-data".

Exactly, just speech-to-text the whole thing and you're done. Bonus: it's a lot speedier to search through.

Since you don't have to justify yourself in court, you're never going to have to submit the actual audio to any judge as evidence, so why would you keep it?

Re: NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

#52

Post by espeed » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 10:14 AM UTC

Reposting this from a previous thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5897654)...

I remember during the Boston bombing investigation, Tim Clemente, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent, told Erin Burnett on CNN that they could go back and get access to the content of the calls between the deceased bomber and his wife, Katherine Russell.

After some Googling, I found a partial transcript of the CNN interview...

"Almost immediately Erin Burnett, the host of CNN's Outfront, wanted to know how the government knew. Aren't phone calls supposed to be private? She interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent on May 1, asking:"

  Is there any way … they [the federal investigators] can
  try to get the phone companies to give that up … It’s not
  a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There’s no way
  they can actually find out what [was said on the call],
  right, unless she tells them?

  Clemente:  There is a way. We certainly have ways in
  national security investigations to find out exactly what
  was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily
  something that the FBI is going to want to present in
  court, but it may help lead the investigation … we 
  certainly can find that out.

  Burnett: So they can actually get that? … that is  
  incredible.

  Clemente: Welcome to America. All of that stuff is being 
  captured as we speak, whether we know it or like it, or 
  not.

Source: http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15340-boston...

CNN Interview Clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPHZrVPt4-U)

CNN Follow-Up Interview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt9kRLrmrjc)

When I initially saw this on CNN, my first thought was, do they also have access to all photos and videos that are taken and transmitted online?

And if so, couldn't they stitch together a multi-angle montage from all the photos and videos taken at the scene of the Boston bombing (like http://photosynth.net), rather than asking everyone to manually scour through their personal footage?

Re: NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

#53

Post by Achshar » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 10:17 AM UTC

yen223 wrote: post #50

Achshar wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are conspiracy theories out there that the whole flooding of the facilities which lead to supply shortage was just a coverup for NSA's order. I don't buy into such FAD, but until a few months ago I wouldn't have bought into the whole NSA thing either. So who knows.

I used to work in Western Digital. This is possibly the easiest conspiracy theory to debunk, since anyone who lived in Bangkok can confirm that the floods were very much real .

The idea was not that they made up the floods, the theory is they made up the supply shortage. They used the floods as a cover up. Now as you said, you worked for WD, and maybe you can prove that their production really did take a huge hit, if yes then well and good, as I said, I am not a fan of the theory either.

Re: NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

#54

Post by northwest » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 10:20 AM UTC

LekkoscPiwa wrote: post #45

Crazy idea: software that would generate TBs of fake communications (email, skype calls, etc) daily to disrupt NSA operations. Possible? Helpful?

If you're paying taxes in the US, you would probably hate this concept, b/c:

You spend something like 25% of your work life (taxes) to pay for something that works against you (mass surveillance). Then you start trowing stones at it while continuing to work for it.

Re: NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

#55

Post by MichaelGG » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 10:24 AM UTC

panarky wrote: post #40

MichaelGG wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uncompressed, 1 hour of phone audio is only ~29MB (8KB/sec*3600s/h). Compressing it for storage can send that way down. Let's assume to 6MB. If every 300M Americans talked for an hour a day, that's only 2TB a day for call audio. Edit: That's only one-way, so double. But compression can eliminate most of that, as there's usually only audio on one side of a call at a time. Anyways, even if I'm right within a factor of…

You're off by three orders of magnitude. 6 MB * 300 million = 1716 TB

You're right and that makes far more sense. I apologize for this idiotic calculation. I should have known better because just capturing call signalling on one company's network, was taking 1TB compressed a day. To be fair I did add a disclaimer :\.

Re: NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

#56

Post by northwest » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 10:25 AM UTC

205guy wrote: post #42

Am I he only one who read that bit about wire-tapping the Supreme Court judges? While unsurprising, that really seems to cross the line from counter-whatever to political manipulation.

Absolutely. It's starting to play "God".

Re: NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

#57

Post by northwest » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 10:32 AM UTC

espeed wrote: post #52

Reposting this from a previous thread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5897654 )... I remember during the Boston bombing investigation, Tim Clemente, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent, told Erin Burnett on CNN that they could go back and get access to the content of the calls between the deceased bomber and his wife, Katherine Russell. After some Googling, I found a partial transcript of the CNN interview...…

And ultimately:

Did they want these events to happen?

Fear is the oldest and cheapest manipulation strategy. Religions such as the Catholic Church have successfully used it for thousands of years:

"It's going to be hell, if you don't do as we say."

Re: NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

#58

Post by MichaelGG » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 10:35 AM UTC

xSwag wrote: post #43

panarky wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're off by three orders of magnitude. 6 MB * 300 million = 1716 TB

You're right, but that's only the calls one way. It should really be times by 2. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=6+MB+*+300+million

See my comment about two-way. It wouldn't matter much as it's rare that both parties are speaking at the same time.

It's also possible that the compression techniques for long-term storage are vastly superior to realtime codecs. The lowest realtime voice codecs are 300-600 bits per second (they sound like shit), which is 213x compression (so an hour would be under a a meg).

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=600bps*1h*300000000

81TB a day. Again, this is assuming one hour of calls for 300 million people.

I did a quick search and found this snippet: "A telephia survey said that Americans average 13 talking hours a month – with the 18-24 age group averaging 22 hours."[1]

So that is under half an hour a day average. So, let's assume 300bps (lowest realtime voice codec I'm aware of), half hour a day, I'll stick to 300M people and we get:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=300bps*30minutes*300000...

20TB.

So maybe I was only an order of magnitude off. Still pretty sloppy of me.

1: http://www.accuconference.com/blog/Cell-Phone-Statistics.asp...

Re: NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

#59

Post by throwawaykf02 » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 10:55 AM UTC

cheald wrote: post #44

So here's my startup idea: Stenographically-encoded messages in high-def porn. It's secure communications with a built-in subscription model! Porn accounts for a huge chunk of internet traffic today, and video doesn't compress too well. Get enough people exchanging messages in porn videos and all of a sudden, those listening in have a whole hell of a lot more bytes to sift through. (I'm only half joking.)

Real terrorists have already been using that for a long time. (For instance, remember those media blurbs about lots of porn being found in the raid on bin Laden?) As such I'd bet they have infrastructure in place to detect such communications.

But in the same half-joking vein, some other problems:

1. I recall reading that such stegonagraphically watermarked videos were pretty easy to detect using simple statistical analysis of the noise in the frames. With dedicated hardware for multimedia decoding cheaply and ubiquitously available, frames can be efficiently extracted and the additional number of bytes does little to slow them down. If the hidden data is encrypted, well, you could just do that without the porn.

2. Unless you make it as easy as tapping a key to start communicating, it still does not remove a main barrier to widespread adoption of encryption, which is inconvenience.

3. The problem with porn is, people will just end up paying more attention to the medium rather than the message.

Re: NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst

#60

Post by yen223 » Sat, Aug 03, 2013, 10:59 AM UTC

Achshar wrote: post #53

yen223 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to work in Western Digital. This is possibly the easiest conspiracy theory to debunk, since anyone who lived in Bangkok can confirm that the floods were very much real .

The idea was not that they made up the floods, the theory is they made up the supply shortage. They used the floods as a cover up. Now as you said, you worked for WD, and maybe you can prove that their production really did take a huge hit, if yes then well and good, as I said, I am not a fan of the theory either.

Ok, that made slightly more sense. But still, all WD drives are assembled either in Thailand or in Malaysia. Something like 2/3 of all WD drives are made in Thailand. During the floods, production in Thailand was shutdown completely for a month or so. The supply disruption was very much real.