10 ms·

‘Reined-In’ N.S.A. Still Collected 151M Phone Records in 2016

188 points by Jerry2 10y ago

omginternets 10y ago
How many "phone records" (for a similar definition of "phone record") did we produce in 2016? Does anyone know?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- asn0 10y ago
  William Binney (former NSA employee turned critic/whistleblower) in 2013 said there were 3 billion phone calls per day in the US[1]. In 2010 Pew[2] said 82% of adults made an average of 5 phone calls per day (~800 million calls), so 3 billion seems reasonable considering business calls, telemarketers, etc. 151 million in a year out of 365 * 3 billion is pretty small. 1. http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/10/what-do-they-know-about-you-an-interview-with-nsa-analyst-william-binney/ http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/10/what-do-they-know-about-yo... 2. http://www.pewinternet.org/2010/09/02/cell-phones-and-american-adults/#uses-of-the-phone-calling-and-texting http://www.pewinternet.org/2010/09/02/cell-phones-and-americ...
vuln 10y ago
"The N.S.A. took in the 151 million records despite obtaining court orders to use the system on only 42 terrorism suspects in 2016, along with a few left over from late 2015, the report said." Needle meet haystack. I wonder.how.many were actually brought up on charges?
- meowface 10y ago
  Not to defend the NSA on ethical grounds, but at least on practical grounds, I would personally find that many records to be a decent trade-off for 42 arrested and convicted suspects who were likely to commit violent acts at some point. As for whether that's the case, who knows.
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    Also, they likely provided intelligence that led back to overseas cells and organizations, which the NSA is supposed to target but which we can't exactly prosecute. It would be a huge blindspot if we couldn't follow the network graph of an organization based abroad because they route comms through the US.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  - mtempm 10y ago
    "Those who would trade their freedom for safety deserve neither freedom nor safety." "Likely to commit crimes" is not just grounds, especially under the US constitution, to remove a citizen's constitutional rights. 'What signify a few lives lost in a century? The tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants.' Just so you are aware, clever tyrants always have taken liberties from their subjects in the name of moral righteousness. The people who established the concept of unalienable constitutional rights here in America were accustomed to the idea that a few lives lost lost in the process of was unavoidable.
    - sbov 10y ago
      > "Those who would trade their freedom for safety deserve neither freedom nor safety." Please stop (mis)qouting this. It means almost the exact opposite of the point people tend to try to make with it. http://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century http://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous...
      - 8note 10y ago
        If I'm reading this right, the context still says that one should not give up their rights in exchange for safety. If it was strictly pro defense, he would've taken the money and given up on governance. Having tax authority is essential for the government, and it shouldn't give it up for the sake of temporary defence money; privacy is essential to citizens, and shouldn't be given up for temporary protection from terrorists. Prescriptivist linguistics is pretty silly though -- words mean what people use them fo
- jjguy 10y ago
  The counterpoint is 151M records represents .0000041% of global call records in 2016. (Based on an estimate of 10B calls per day worldwide)
  - Retric 10y ago
    US is only 4.4 percent of the global population and they don't need permission to spy on non Americans.
    - meowface 10y ago
      In a world where hostile countries, some of them superpowers, also don't need permission to spy on non-citizens, what other option is there?
      - desdiv 10y ago
        Maybe we shouldn't compare ourselves to authoritarian shitholes. Maybe we should compare ourselves to a country where a Constitution applies and unreasonable searches and seizures doesn't happen. Maybe we can strive to be better rather than race to the bottom.
        anigbrowl 10y ago
        Well we should certainly distinguish ourselves by our behavior, eg not imprisoning people without trial or [autocratic stuff]. On the other hand, passively vacuuming up information doesn't actively harm people. Just for context, I assume all my calls are logged and have been for years, not just in this country. I don't feel bad about this, both because I can understand why securocrats would be curious about me, and out of a basic optimism that this won't be actionable unless there is a security incentive - ie I assume who I talk to an the phone won't be shared with Dept. of Parking Tickets or other civil authorities.
        reactor4 10y ago
        oh but it does actively harm through self-censorship and more directly to those who gets in the crosshairs a posteriori because of their activism, dissension or business activities. Regarding your second paragraph, parallel construction comes to mind.
SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
Just to try and think through the situation: I don't use the phone particularly a lot, and I probably make 1 call per day on average. So I make 365 calls a year. Let's say 350 to round. There are about 200,000,000 US adults. So if everyone makes as many calls as me, that's 70,000,000,000 calls a year. Each call should generate two book-keeping entries at the carriers -- so ~150 billion records a year. (Note: pure supposition this is what they mean by 'record', but phone carriers giving them a metadata firehose seems consistent with what we know.) So, we're talking 0.1% (and quite possibly less) of the phone calls? Ya know, I'm probably okay with that level of snooping on metadata from a spy agency (especially if they're not sharing the data with domestic agencies for domestic cases). Ed: I'm likely off by being at least an order of magnitude too low -- divide all my estimates of people targeted by 10 or so.
- brewdad 10y ago
  One would presume that SMS and MMS messages get caught up in this too. I send an order of magnitude more texts than phone calls. The % of users caught up in the dragnet must certainly be smaller than your estimate.
- comex 10y ago
  It's not a random sample of 0.1% of calls, though. Rather, they're collecting all the call metadata of a small fraction of subscribers; the number of people targeted may be relatively small (though not small in absolute terms), but each person targeted has their privacy significantly invaded, as the NSA learns quite a lot about their life. And to be targeted, you only have to have once talked to someone for whom the NSA has a "reasonable suspicion" they might be involved in terrorism. No need to do anything suspicious yourself.
  - SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    Yes, I'm aware. But we're talking... one in a thousand people, likely targeting mostly those involved heavily with international relationships. Even if you confine it to the Arab population, they're still not tapping everyone (closer to 1 in 6, if it were all Arab targets, which is unlikely). If you confine it to immigrants, it's 1 in 200. This suggests that they're using some actual basis for their selection (as you seem to be aware). It's unfortunate, but if they're collecting metadata for network analysis and if their selection criteria is that it's foreign related (and preferably tracing back to known networks), then it doesn't really strike me as a problem. Also, your last line isn't true -- talking to someone who is strongly suspected of being a terrorist is suspicious until analysis reveals the nature of the relationship, particularly if you go on to contact others. I suspect that people who only ping once (or even very intermittently) are quickly pruned as not being useful to observe.
pmoriarty 10y ago
There is nothing in the world that would ever make me believe they weren't spying as much as possible on everyone they could. What humans could resist such enormous power?
- lucasmullens 10y ago
  Morally good ones?
  - trendia 10y ago
    "Morally good" is dependent on perspective. I'm sure there are patriotic, moral NSA workers who believe that they are helping make America safe, and that it is morally better to lie to Americans and save their lives, than to tell them the truth and let Americans die. Of course, I'd disagree with that entirely -- there's no way of knowing how effective the NSA program is at stopping terrorism and no way to know that it's not being used for nefarious purposes... but the idea that there is a moral "good" and a moral "bad" ignores the nuance inherent in making such judgments.
    - wordupmaking 10y ago
      > "Morally good" is dependent on perspective. Yes, and? A computer stuck in a loop also is working perfectly fine "according to its own logic or perspective". That is its perspective, just like the moral judgement of others is their perspective. This does not lessen my own perspective and judgement one iota, and changing adjectives doesn't really help. That is, I wouldn't have said "morally good ones", I would have said people who weren't abused to created an bottomless hole in their mind. But what is abuse? What is a hole? A matter of perspective, and it's not like I can point to any results of my own ideals and actions other than the heat death of the universe... so who's to judge? I am, and you are, and then we simply append "IMO" to everything when someone forgets to explicitly mention it. Also, yes, sometimes people are thinking they are helping others. Sometimes they are not, and sometimes they revel in that. Are you sure those don't exist? Why do you just mention people who mean well? That's fantasy, not nuance. Where are the lines between those people, and people who hear voices telling them they need to murder babies to avoid some space monster from eating Earth, and from people who know they are hurting and destroying people, but are convinced they deserve it, who have an inner reservoir of fear and pain that, in their mind, dwarves the lives of anybody else who ever existed? And even all that is not even beginning to touch nuance. When someone implies everybody would be tempted by power, that's lacking nuance, too, and even just going "nah, I personally disagree" does restore some of it, any further qualifiers are a bonus. I agree that "this is evil" does not carry very much information, but neither does "some might mean well". Not well enough to stop the ones who don't mean well, so let those take a number. It takes one bad apple, and a lot of good apples who don't have hands or suck at throwing, to spoil the whole damn barrel.
rl3 10y ago
Saying that the NSA is "reined in" is a joke: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14222114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14222114
sandworm101 10y ago
>> 151 million records Does anyone hear seriously believe they only "took in" 151 million of anything? That's a single flashdrive. NSA operates datacenters. The things they collect are measured by numbers well into billions.
- nyolfen 10y ago
  > The Utah Data Center, also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center,[1] is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
- awqrre 10y ago
  Collected, as defined by the NSA, is only the data that they looked at, not the data that they have. And they probably don't count the data that was looked at by a program.
jellicle 10y ago
Again, please understand that the NSA uses a non-English definition of the word "collect". The NSA calls getting data and copying data to its datacenters "interception". It calls having a human NSA employee read that data, "collection". 99.999% of the data it copies to its datacenters is not "collected". The NSA copies all your phone calls and emails and web browsing and so on. ALL. It only reads some of them. Each of these articles is always written about one particular narrow NSA program, ignoring other very-similar programs, in order to minimize the apparent spying going on. For this article, the 151M records being talked about are one tiny program to query telephone call records generated by US phone companies. This is like 0.01% of what the NSA pays attention to. The NSA is already intercepting the full call anyway! But that's a different program...
- besselheim 10y ago
  The distinction does make sense though. If an intercept is taken, never looked at, and eventually deleted, then from a 'privacy violation' point of view it may as well not have been collected at all. But these still need to be intercepted in the first place, because you don't know in advance which of the 0.01% of records are of interest.
  - colemannugent 10y ago
    From a privacy standpoint, the fact that they make a copy of your data is alarming, as this multiplies the attack surface for your data. Also, all the data is "looked at". Sure, not by a human, but if the algorithmn can flag you as a terrorist and then humans look through the data, what's the difference. You also seem to be under the impression that they delete the data once they're done. But why would they ever delete that copy of your data unless they need the space for something else? They never will, and that's why they're building a huge datacenter in Utah, to store EVERYTHING INDEFINITELY. As to your last point, I'll flip the table: if only 0.01% of the records are interesting and only 0.01% of those records lead to any meaningful insight into terrorist activities, why should we continue these programs knowing that they are, on average, 99.999% ineffective?
    - deleted 10y ago
Sideloader 10y ago
Yeah yeah the NSA data mines everyone and their dog. Welcome to 2013. Now why doesn't the NYT investigate what other illegal skullduggery the NSA and its 16 sister agencies are involved in? Wasn't there a massive leak of intel agency info to Wikileaks a few months ago? Oh yeah I forgot...the NYT, along with the rest of the mainstream media, act as neoliberalism's propaganda department and are about as interested in truth and honesty as, say, Donald Trump.
- rl3 10y ago
  >Yeah yeah the NSA data mines everyone and their dog. Welcome to 2013. Now why doesn't the NYT investigate ... 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/bush-lets-us-spy-on-callers-without-courts.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/bush-lets-us-spy-...
  - 3131s 10y ago
    1988... http://www.duncancampbell.org/menu/journalism/newstatesman/newstatesman-1988/They've%20got%20it%20taped.pdf http://www.duncancampbell.org/menu/journalism/newstatesman/n...
Mrtierne 10y ago
Isn't Facebook still doing this? You have to explicitly restrict FB access to your microphone or they will use convos to inform advertising ... or conspiracy theory?
- iopuy 10y ago
  Please provide a source for this. I assume you mean the messenger app.
- Gustomaximus 10y ago
  They do listen. I believe this is openly on their help pages. They dont store 'raw audio' so must turn this into text or meta data. FB use the information to help identify what you are watching/listening to to help improve your posts... so yeah pretty much going o be used for advertising. I wonder how many people would remove FB if they knew this. I'm one of the people less bothered by internet advertising (I commented to this about 3 days ago re ad-blocking and cookies) and to me it seems amazing people accept this level of intrusion.
  - rock_hard 10y ago
    Source or it didn't happen
    - Gustomaximus 10y ago
      "Facebook says explicitly on its help pages that it doesn’t record conversations, but that it does use the audio to identify what is happening around the phone. The site promotes the feature as an easy way of identifying what you are listening to or watching, to make it easier and quicker to post about whatever’s going on." http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-using-people-s-phones-to-listen-in-on-what-they-re-saying-claims-professor-a7057526.html http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...
cryptarch 10y ago
Vatican Shadow is an artist that makes music about the War on Terror. I would recommend "Remeber Your Black Day" or "Death Is Unity With God". It's a spiritual continuation of the work of the deceased UK artist Muslimgauze who's released 90+ releases so far, and who has dedicated over half his short life to making music to protest the Israel-Palestine conflict. There are still quarterly+ releases of his work 18 years after his death because he left a huge back catalog of unreleased work. At his peak he was making an album a day, and if you gave him something to listen to he'd return you an "improved version" the next day. Muzlimgauze's intent was to call attention to, and make people read about the Israel-Palestine conflict; I think Vatican Shadow has a similar intention.
Steeeve 10y ago
Hmm... My first thought was that 151M call records is not a significant amount considering that we're talking about the population of the United States. Rough calculations based on some very round numbers is that this would account for between .019 and .033 percent of the adult US population. (~150M call records/year ~= 50-80,000 people, US Adult Population ~ 242,470,800) Extrapolated, that number is a little concerning. By my estimate, that means between 2 and 3 of every 10K people is under some sort of surveillance. But then again... apply that to say... San Francisco - population ~900K and you get between 180 and 270 people. Or NYC with 1.7M people and you get between 340 and 510 people.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
ptaipale 10y ago
151 million records sounds like a very, very low number of phone records for US. Suspiciously low, in fact. I would expect that amount to come out from the records of the domestic surveillance organisations of Luxembourg.
- 3131s 10y ago
  Almost definitely because that's the number of records inspected directly by a human, not the number that are stored, or the number that are inspected by algorithms.
DanBC 10y ago
What is a call record, and who gets to define what it is? When data changes my gut reaction is "better or worse reporting until shown otherwise", and "what are they counting?"
pvnick 10y ago
My opinion regarding the NSA has changed over time. During the Snowden revelations (Snowden is still a hero of mine), I was greatly opposed to foreign spying, e.g. on Petrobras and Angela Merkel. Over the years I've realized how powerful and important such information is for peaceful diplomacy, and that the United States has a post-WWII responsibility to maintain that peace. However, the recent debacle regarding potential political spying has vindicated my earliest fears - that this can be used to subvert the domestic democratic process. Doesn't matter whether the spying did or did not occur (probably both sides are stretching the truth). We're living in an age where it is at least conceivable by a large portion of the country that the NSA's tools were improperly used against US citizens. It's time for a vigorous debate on clear guidelines regarding these powers.

188 points by Jerry2 10y ago

omginternets 10y ago

How many "phone records" (for a similar definition of "phone record") did we produce in 2016? Does anyone know?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
asn0 10y ago
William Binney (former NSA employee turned critic/whistleblower) in 2013 said there were 3 billion phone calls per day in the US[1]. In 2010 Pew[2] said 82% of adults made an average of 5 phone calls per day (~800 million calls), so 3 billion seems reasonable considering business calls, telemarketers, etc. 151 million in a year out of 365 * 3 billion is pretty small. 1. http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/10/what-do-they-know-about-you-an-interview-with-nsa-analyst-william-binney/ http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/10/what-do-they-know-about-yo... 2. http://www.pewinternet.org/2010/09/02/cell-phones-and-american-adults/#uses-of-the-phone-calling-and-texting http://www.pewinternet.org/2010/09/02/cell-phones-and-americ...

vuln 10y ago

"The N.S.A. took in the 151 million records despite obtaining court orders to use the system on only 42 terrorism suspects in 2016, along with a few left over from late 2015, the report said." Needle meet haystack. I wonder.how.many were actually brought up on charges?

meowface 10y ago
Not to defend the NSA on ethical grounds, but at least on practical grounds, I would personally find that many records to be a decent trade-off for 42 arrested and convicted suspects who were likely to commit violent acts at some point. As for whether that's the case, who knows.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  Also, they likely provided intelligence that led back to overseas cells and organizations, which the NSA is supposed to target but which we can't exactly prosecute. It would be a huge blindspot if we couldn't follow the network graph of an organization based abroad because they route comms through the US.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- mtempm 10y ago
  "Those who would trade their freedom for safety deserve neither freedom nor safety." "Likely to commit crimes" is not just grounds, especially under the US constitution, to remove a citizen's constitutional rights. 'What signify a few lives lost in a century? The tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants.' Just so you are aware, clever tyrants always have taken liberties from their subjects in the name of moral righteousness. The people who established the concept of unalienable constitutional rights here in America were accustomed to the idea that a few lives lost lost in the process of was unavoidable.
  - sbov 10y ago
    > "Those who would trade their freedom for safety deserve neither freedom nor safety." Please stop (mis)qouting this. It means almost the exact opposite of the point people tend to try to make with it. http://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century http://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous...
    - 8note 10y ago
      If I'm reading this right, the context still says that one should not give up their rights in exchange for safety. If it was strictly pro defense, he would've taken the money and given up on governance. Having tax authority is essential for the government, and it shouldn't give it up for the sake of temporary defence money; privacy is essential to citizens, and shouldn't be given up for temporary protection from terrorists. Prescriptivist linguistics is pretty silly though -- words mean what people use them fo
jjguy 10y ago
The counterpoint is 151M records represents .0000041% of global call records in 2016. (Based on an estimate of 10B calls per day worldwide)
- Retric 10y ago
  US is only 4.4 percent of the global population and they don't need permission to spy on non Americans.
  - meowface 10y ago
    In a world where hostile countries, some of them superpowers, also don't need permission to spy on non-citizens, what other option is there?
    - desdiv 10y ago
      Maybe we shouldn't compare ourselves to authoritarian shitholes. Maybe we should compare ourselves to a country where a Constitution applies and unreasonable searches and seizures doesn't happen. Maybe we can strive to be better rather than race to the bottom.
      - anigbrowl 10y ago
        Well we should certainly distinguish ourselves by our behavior, eg not imprisoning people without trial or [autocratic stuff]. On the other hand, passively vacuuming up information doesn't actively harm people. Just for context, I assume all my calls are logged and have been for years, not just in this country. I don't feel bad about this, both because I can understand why securocrats would be curious about me, and out of a basic optimism that this won't be actionable unless there is a security incentive - ie I assume who I talk to an the phone won't be shared with Dept. of Parking Tickets or other civil authorities.
        reactor4 10y ago
        oh but it does actively harm through self-censorship and more directly to those who gets in the crosshairs a posteriori because of their activism, dissension or business activities. Regarding your second paragraph, parallel construction comes to mind.

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago

Just to try and think through the situation: I don't use the phone particularly a lot, and I probably make 1 call per day on average. So I make 365 calls a year. Let's say 350 to round. There are about 200,000,000 US adults. So if everyone makes as many calls as me, that's 70,000,000,000 calls a year. Each call should generate two book-keeping entries at the carriers -- so ~150 billion records a year. (Note: pure supposition this is what they mean by 'record', but phone carriers giving them a metadata firehose seems consistent with what we know.) So, we're talking 0.1% (and quite possibly less) of the phone calls? Ya know, I'm probably okay with that level of snooping on metadata from a spy agency (especially if they're not sharing the data with domestic agencies for domestic cases). Ed: I'm likely off by being at least an order of magnitude too low -- divide all my estimates of people targeted by 10 or so.

brewdad 10y ago
One would presume that SMS and MMS messages get caught up in this too. I send an order of magnitude more texts than phone calls. The % of users caught up in the dragnet must certainly be smaller than your estimate.
comex 10y ago
It's not a random sample of 0.1% of calls, though. Rather, they're collecting all the call metadata of a small fraction of subscribers; the number of people targeted may be relatively small (though not small in absolute terms), but each person targeted has their privacy significantly invaded, as the NSA learns quite a lot about their life. And to be targeted, you only have to have once talked to someone for whom the NSA has a "reasonable suspicion" they might be involved in terrorism. No need to do anything suspicious yourself.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  Yes, I'm aware. But we're talking... one in a thousand people, likely targeting mostly those involved heavily with international relationships. Even if you confine it to the Arab population, they're still not tapping everyone (closer to 1 in 6, if it were all Arab targets, which is unlikely). If you confine it to immigrants, it's 1 in 200. This suggests that they're using some actual basis for their selection (as you seem to be aware). It's unfortunate, but if they're collecting metadata for network analysis and if their selection criteria is that it's foreign related (and preferably tracing back to known networks), then it doesn't really strike me as a problem. Also, your last line isn't true -- talking to someone who is strongly suspected of being a terrorist is suspicious until analysis reveals the nature of the relationship, particularly if you go on to contact others. I suspect that people who only ping once (or even very intermittently) are quickly pruned as not being useful to observe.

pmoriarty 10y ago

There is nothing in the world that would ever make me believe they weren't spying as much as possible on everyone they could. What humans could resist such enormous power?

lucasmullens 10y ago
Morally good ones?
- trendia 10y ago
  "Morally good" is dependent on perspective. I'm sure there are patriotic, moral NSA workers who believe that they are helping make America safe, and that it is morally better to lie to Americans and save their lives, than to tell them the truth and let Americans die. Of course, I'd disagree with that entirely -- there's no way of knowing how effective the NSA program is at stopping terrorism and no way to know that it's not being used for nefarious purposes... but the idea that there is a moral "good" and a moral "bad" ignores the nuance inherent in making such judgments.
  - wordupmaking 10y ago
    > "Morally good" is dependent on perspective. Yes, and? A computer stuck in a loop also is working perfectly fine "according to its own logic or perspective". That is its perspective, just like the moral judgement of others is their perspective. This does not lessen my own perspective and judgement one iota, and changing adjectives doesn't really help. That is, I wouldn't have said "morally good ones", I would have said people who weren't abused to created an bottomless hole in their mind. But what is abuse? What is a hole? A matter of perspective, and it's not like I can point to any results of my own ideals and actions other than the heat death of the universe... so who's to judge? I am, and you are, and then we simply append "IMO" to everything when someone forgets to explicitly mention it. Also, yes, sometimes people are thinking they are helping others. Sometimes they are not, and sometimes they revel in that. Are you sure those don't exist? Why do you just mention people who mean well? That's fantasy, not nuance. Where are the lines between those people, and people who hear voices telling them they need to murder babies to avoid some space monster from eating Earth, and from people who know they are hurting and destroying people, but are convinced they deserve it, who have an inner reservoir of fear and pain that, in their mind, dwarves the lives of anybody else who ever existed? And even all that is not even beginning to touch nuance. When someone implies everybody would be tempted by power, that's lacking nuance, too, and even just going "nah, I personally disagree" does restore some of it, any further qualifiers are a bonus. I agree that "this is evil" does not carry very much information, but neither does "some might mean well". Not well enough to stop the ones who don't mean well, so let those take a number. It takes one bad apple, and a lot of good apples who don't have hands or suck at throwing, to spoil the whole damn barrel.

rl3 10y ago

Saying that the NSA is "reined in" is a joke: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14222114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14222114

sandworm101 10y ago

>> 151 million records Does anyone hear seriously believe they only "took in" 151 million of anything? That's a single flashdrive. NSA operates datacenters. The things they collect are measured by numbers well into billions.

nyolfen 10y ago
> The Utah Data Center, also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center,[1] is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
awqrre 10y ago
Collected, as defined by the NSA, is only the data that they looked at, not the data that they have. And they probably don't count the data that was looked at by a program.

jellicle 10y ago

Again, please understand that the NSA uses a non-English definition of the word "collect". The NSA calls getting data and copying data to its datacenters "interception". It calls having a human NSA employee read that data, "collection". 99.999% of the data it copies to its datacenters is not "collected". The NSA copies all your phone calls and emails and web browsing and so on. ALL. It only reads some of them. Each of these articles is always written about one particular narrow NSA program, ignoring other very-similar programs, in order to minimize the apparent spying going on. For this article, the 151M records being talked about are one tiny program to query telephone call records generated by US phone companies. This is like 0.01% of what the NSA pays attention to. The NSA is already intercepting the full call anyway! But that's a different program...

besselheim 10y ago
The distinction does make sense though. If an intercept is taken, never looked at, and eventually deleted, then from a 'privacy violation' point of view it may as well not have been collected at all. But these still need to be intercepted in the first place, because you don't know in advance which of the 0.01% of records are of interest.
- colemannugent 10y ago
  From a privacy standpoint, the fact that they make a copy of your data is alarming, as this multiplies the attack surface for your data. Also, all the data is "looked at". Sure, not by a human, but if the algorithmn can flag you as a terrorist and then humans look through the data, what's the difference. You also seem to be under the impression that they delete the data once they're done. But why would they ever delete that copy of your data unless they need the space for something else? They never will, and that's why they're building a huge datacenter in Utah, to store EVERYTHING INDEFINITELY. As to your last point, I'll flip the table: if only 0.01% of the records are interesting and only 0.01% of those records lead to any meaningful insight into terrorist activities, why should we continue these programs knowing that they are, on average, 99.999% ineffective?
  - deleted 10y ago

Sideloader 10y ago

Yeah yeah the NSA data mines everyone and their dog. Welcome to 2013. Now why doesn't the NYT investigate what other illegal skullduggery the NSA and its 16 sister agencies are involved in? Wasn't there a massive leak of intel agency info to Wikileaks a few months ago? Oh yeah I forgot...the NYT, along with the rest of the mainstream media, act as neoliberalism's propaganda department and are about as interested in truth and honesty as, say, Donald Trump.

rl3 10y ago
>Yeah yeah the NSA data mines everyone and their dog. Welcome to 2013. Now why doesn't the NYT investigate ... 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/bush-lets-us-spy-on-callers-without-courts.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/bush-lets-us-spy-...
- 3131s 10y ago
  1988... http://www.duncancampbell.org/menu/journalism/newstatesman/newstatesman-1988/They've%20got%20it%20taped.pdf http://www.duncancampbell.org/menu/journalism/newstatesman/n...

Mrtierne 10y ago

Isn't Facebook still doing this? You have to explicitly restrict FB access to your microphone or they will use convos to inform advertising ... or conspiracy theory?

iopuy 10y ago
Please provide a source for this. I assume you mean the messenger app.
Gustomaximus 10y ago
They do listen. I believe this is openly on their help pages. They dont store 'raw audio' so must turn this into text or meta data. FB use the information to help identify what you are watching/listening to to help improve your posts... so yeah pretty much going o be used for advertising. I wonder how many people would remove FB if they knew this. I'm one of the people less bothered by internet advertising (I commented to this about 3 days ago re ad-blocking and cookies) and to me it seems amazing people accept this level of intrusion.
- rock_hard 10y ago
  Source or it didn't happen
  - Gustomaximus 10y ago
    "Facebook says explicitly on its help pages that it doesn’t record conversations, but that it does use the audio to identify what is happening around the phone. The site promotes the feature as an easy way of identifying what you are listening to or watching, to make it easier and quicker to post about whatever’s going on." http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-using-people-s-phones-to-listen-in-on-what-they-re-saying-claims-professor-a7057526.html http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...

cryptarch 10y ago

Vatican Shadow is an artist that makes music about the War on Terror. I would recommend "Remeber Your Black Day" or "Death Is Unity With God". It's a spiritual continuation of the work of the deceased UK artist Muslimgauze who's released 90+ releases so far, and who has dedicated over half his short life to making music to protest the Israel-Palestine conflict. There are still quarterly+ releases of his work 18 years after his death because he left a huge back catalog of unreleased work. At his peak he was making an album a day, and if you gave him something to listen to he'd return you an "improved version" the next day. Muzlimgauze's intent was to call attention to, and make people read about the Israel-Palestine conflict; I think Vatican Shadow has a similar intention.

Steeeve 10y ago

Hmm... My first thought was that 151M call records is not a significant amount considering that we're talking about the population of the United States. Rough calculations based on some very round numbers is that this would account for between .019 and .033 percent of the adult US population. (~150M call records/year ~= 50-80,000 people, US Adult Population ~ 242,470,800) Extrapolated, that number is a little concerning. By my estimate, that means between 2 and 3 of every 10K people is under some sort of surveillance. But then again... apply that to say... San Francisco - population ~900K and you get between 180 and 270 people. Or NYC with 1.7M people and you get between 340 and 510 people.

deleted 10y ago
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ptaipale 10y ago

151 million records sounds like a very, very low number of phone records for US. Suspiciously low, in fact. I would expect that amount to come out from the records of the domestic surveillance organisations of Luxembourg.

3131s 10y ago
Almost definitely because that's the number of records inspected directly by a human, not the number that are stored, or the number that are inspected by algorithms.

DanBC 10y ago

What is a call record, and who gets to define what it is? When data changes my gut reaction is "better or worse reporting until shown otherwise", and "what are they counting?"

pvnick 10y ago

My opinion regarding the NSA has changed over time. During the Snowden revelations (Snowden is still a hero of mine), I was greatly opposed to foreign spying, e.g. on Petrobras and Angela Merkel. Over the years I've realized how powerful and important such information is for peaceful diplomacy, and that the United States has a post-WWII responsibility to maintain that peace. However, the recent debacle regarding potential political spying has vindicated my earliest fears - that this can be used to subvert the domestic democratic process. Doesn't matter whether the spying did or did not occur (probably both sides are stretching the truth). We're living in an age where it is at least conceivable by a large portion of the country that the NSA's tools were improperly used against US citizens. It's time for a vigorous debate on clear guidelines regarding these powers.