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NSA collected 500M U.S. call records in 2017, a sharp rise: official report
- olfactory 8y agoI think the bottom line is that the American people do not really mind the NSA doing this. I suspect this is because most people do not realize just how powerful and privacy-invading metadata surveillance is, or how the dataset does not need to be added to indefinitely to have tremendous value to law enforcement (for appropriate and inappropriate uses) once it exists at sufficient scale.
- citilife 8y agoI think the people that do realize, short of armed rebellion, can do very little. If the people who control 60% of the nations wealth want to do this, all the complaining in the world isn't going to do anything.
- coralreef 8y agoIf the people who control 60% of the nations wealth want to do this, all the complaining in the world isn't going to do anything. Can you elaborate on this? Why are the wealthy interested in empowering the NSA?
- outside2344 8y agoWhat he is saying, I think, is that because of Citizens United, money controls our politics at this point and it really doesn't really matter what Joe Smith thinks. We can prove that wrong in November, of course. EDIT: Its true that the democrats are just as bought, but I have faith that they would also appoint a supreme court that would rule the other way as well.
- VeronicaJJ123 8y agoIt is other way round I feel. Because of Citizens United a lot of groups are able to raise money and awareness about this.
- mkempe 8y agoThis argument is obviously flawed: Hillary Clinton received more money, spent vastly more money, and lost. [edit] Down-voting does not change the above facts.
- scrumption 8y agoYou've missed the point entirely, on purpose I imagine. The impact of Citizens United is primarily with regard to corporate lobbying, not campaign contributions. Super PACs, the biggest travesty to come out of Citizens United, explicitly CANNOT contribute to election campaigns or specific parties.
- mkempe 8y agoCitizens United is especially relevant to presidential elections -- it arose directly out of the 2004 and 2008 campaigns. "The conservative non-profit organization Citizens United wanted to air a film critical of Hillary Clinton and to advertise the film during television broadcasts, which was a violation of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, commonly known as the McCain–Feingold Act..." [1] In other words, you are wrong about Citizens United, and unpleasant about it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
- dang 8y agoThis is another comment that crossed into incivility. If you want to keep posting to HN, we need you to follow the rules at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago> We can prove that wrong in November, of course. The Democrats are no better when it comes to these issues, look at their voting record.
- samstave 8y agoThe wealthy dont care what the NSA does so long as they can remaim wealthy. The 1% can pay whatever is required to protect their wealth - and its why the panama papers is the biggest scandal of all time. So long as the 1% can live without consequence, they dont care how anything the government does affects the masses.
- Thriptic 8y agoIt's more complicated than that. You can bet many wealthy people DO care about these things (in fact, I know some who do); however, if they stand up against them then they riak preferential targetting far more than the average citizen precisely because they have influence and need to be shut down.
- wmeredith 8y agoMostly because the NSA will enforce the status quo which has made them powerful and the oligarchs rich (and powerful). It's a self-feeding mechanism. Read more about this phenomenon–the beige dictatorship– here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/political-failure-modes-and-th.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/politica...
- samstave 8y agoThe nation needs a “tax sit-in” - everyone ridicules this, but wtf do people think the boston tea party was about. If you want governments to listen without armed rebellion, the only thing one can do is refuse taxes. They know that this is the inly othe tool you have - and thats why taxes are woven into the fabric of the economy such that its automatically taken without you having any control over them. Its also why you can never truly own land. Dont pay taxes on land, and they will take it. You can only pay for the privilege to rent land. Forever.
- chatmasta 8y agoThe problem is w2 employees (i.e. most of the workforce) get their taxes taken out of their paychecks automatically. It would be nearly impossible to withhold those taxes from the government. Interestingly, the more independent contractors in a population, the easier it would be to stage a tax sit-in.
- samstave 8y agoThat is my point about it being woven into the economy such that you have no control over it.
- eric_h 8y ago> The problem is w2 employees (i.e. most of the workforce) get their taxes taken out of their paychecks automatically That's not a requirement, though. You can opt to have no taxes withheld and just pay what you owe in April. Of course, if you then don't pay your taxes, the IRS will find you.
- mcone 8y ago"Government: If you refuse to pay unjust taxes, your property will be confiscated. If you attempt to defend your property, you will be arrested. If you resist arrest, you will be clubbed. If you defend yourself against clubbing, you will be shot dead. These procedures are known as the Rule of Law." - Edward Abbey
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- knaik94 8y agoI think part of the problem lies in the fact that the consumers aren't the ones who have control over the dataset. The NSA pressures the Telecoms.
- rhizome 8y agoNot to be glib, but I think I saw this comment a couple weeks ago, substituting "Facebook" for "the NSA."
- java-man 8y agothe message does not change. we, as a society, seem to be ok with trading privacy for free fb or illusion of safety.
- toufique 8y agoMajor difference though is that we as individuals gave Facebook permission, and most of us would still knowingly make a "limited tracking in exchange for tangible personal utility" trade. We as individuals never gave the NSA permission to track us, and most of us would never knowingly make the "unlimited tracking in exchange for nebulous collective utility" trade.
- jahvo 8y agoOr maybe they think this is acceptable, in the interest of security. I personally find this kind of stuff acceptable.
- drb91 8y agoPart of the problem is that privacy invasion is only visible when it results in arrests, leaking, or some other use of the power to effect change. Most people will never experience someone obviously exploiting their trust here. Of course, the complacency of us individuals reduces the security and privacy of us all. Realistically the NSA hasn’t been successful in reducing terrorist threats; in fact, the correlation is negative.
- BookmarkSaver 8y ago>Realistically the NSA hasn’t been successful in reducing terrorist threats; in fact, the correlation is negative. What are you basing this on?
- scrumption 8y agoMass shootings have tripled since 2011.
- BookmarkSaver 8y agoThis entire thread is proof that people will vehemently spout opinions on topics that they don't even have the slightest understanding of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency Try reading literally just the first paragraph.
- scrumption 8y agoThanks for that reputable source -- but I'm still missing your implication. Do you mean to say that the NSA is primarily concerned with foreign intelligence rather than combating domestic terrorism? Then why so much domestic spying, the entire point of this conversation thread? Furthermore, are you trying to tell me you think they've done a good job in their counterintelligence work? Honestly, given what we have observed in the Middle East for decades and what happened in 2016?
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- empath75 8y agoand 490 million of those were robo-calls selling mexican time shares.
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- imhelpingu 8y agoThis report is, of course, a distraction from their ability to archive historical reality to a resolution 1 mm and 1 ms.
- icebraining 8y agoWhat are the other kinds of realities?
- anoncoward778 8y agoAutomatically collecting everyone's cell phone data, has software automatically installed in Smart TV's everywhere, monitors your online footprint (emails, social media[of course]). All those warning from Snowden all those secret software reveals from wikileaks an untold amount of funding from congress with virtually no oversight. And yet tons of bad things keep happening to regular citizens in the US. What exactly does the NSA do? Whom are they protecting? Cause it sure is not the average citizen. Just a random venting from a pissed of copper-top battery.
- BigChiefSmokem 8y agoIt was created to work on code-breaking during World War II and then formalized by Harry Truman as an official agency. It was made to serve the military and in turn the American people but over time their mission has been perverted for the sake of security theater.
- BookmarkSaver 8y ago>And yet tons of bad things keep happening to regular citizens in the US. Like what? I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about here. >What exactly does the NSA do? Whom are they protecting? Cause it sure is not the average citizen. ??? Sounds like you know absolutely nothing about espionage. Maybe you are right, but intelligence agencies don't talk about their activities, even their successes, for very good reason.
- ianai 8y agoYes and I imagine even having records on everyone wouldn’t be enough to catch all cases. Some of the recent offenders really seemed to only identify as problems during the act. No chance to stop them.
- scrumption 8y ago>Like what? I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about here. Uh, the constant mass shootings that have occurred over the past year wherein, 100% of the time, the perp was already known to police and FBI and had a very public troubling online presence detailing their years of mental instability and virulent racism? >intelligence agencies don't talk about their activities, even their successes, for very good reason. The hell are you talking about? The FBI is constantly publicly congratulating themselves when they "foil" a "plot" their agent provocateurs have cooked up. https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/ep-31-fake-isis-plots-and-the-selling-of-forever-war https://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/ep-31-fake-isis-plots-and... The NSA doesn't like to brag as much as the FBI does but they're clearly just as responsible for dropping the ball on domestic terrorism every other week when yet another mass shooting happens...
- mkempe 8y agoDoes "collected" mean that these calls have been searched for criminal or terrorist activity? I recall that Clapper --or someone like him-- was using that distinction in order to claim that the NSA wasn't "collecting" the phone calls of US citizens. edit: ah yes, it was Clapper; to Congress, in 2013. [1] [1] https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/lawmakers-resume-calls-for-james-clapper-perjury-charges https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/lawmakers-re...
- lern_too_spel 8y agoNo, it means this is the number of records they got from the telecoms.
- mkempe 8y agoActually, it means these records have been returned as part of queries. We know the NSA collects closer to trillions of domestic records (from phone calls to text messages and emails) and brazenly lies about it to Congress.
- lern_too_spel 8y ago> We know the NSA collects closer to trillions of domestic records (from phone calls to text messages and emails) and brazenly lies about it to Congress. We know all of that to be false, according to Snowden's documents.
- rossdavidh 8y agoWait, people still make phone calls?
- rossdavidh 8y agoKidding, I'm kidding.
- gdsdfe 8y agoIf it's collecting this much stuff why not be useful and stop all these annoying phone scammers!
- adamson 8y agoMaybe that’s where the spike came from
- stonepresto 8y agoI don't think they have the authority to stop a private company's service (verizon, etc.). Also, they don't monitor the calls themselves, so it would be impossible to tell if it was a scammer until someone reported it, and blacklisting one-by-one will never be effective since they can just change the number.
- e12e 8y agoYeah, I'm sure it's impossible to guess who's a scammed based on meta-data... /s
- sgroppino 8y agoWhat is that as a percentage of the total number of calls?
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoWith 300M people in the US? Of them, at least 250M have phones, so... two calls per person per year? (Double it if both ends of the conversation are in the US.) I'm going to guess that the average is more like four calls per day than four calls per year, so... maybe 0.3% of calls? That's far too many. And yet, it's still a very long way from blanket surveillance.
- cm2187 8y agoYeah, but I doubt it is evenly distributed.
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoI doubt it is, too. It's probably seeded - starting with one individual, they collect every call. Maybe for ever person they call, they collect every call that person makes. If they're really worried, they may go one layer further. It's a way of tracing networks. So if one of those people calls you, your call record got collected. If you are one of those people, all of your call records got collected. But hey, NSA, you want to pick me? Trace some of those spammers who keep calling my cell phone.
- ams6110 8y agoHeh. I probably get at least half a dozen calls a day. I actually answer only about one a week though.
- jancsika 8y ago> That's far too many. Quick clarification of what's being discussed here-- What AnimalMuppet has estimated is that someone or some group in the Dept. of Defense has made a request to analyze call metadata, the sum total of which may come to 0.3% of all calls. In other words, that 0.3% reflects the data that has been parsed into a form intelligible for someone or some group working at (or perhaps even sub-contracted by) the DoD. The amount of call metadata that is available to the NSA for such requests (available either through one of their monstrously large data centers like the one in Utah, or available through one of their many programs that automate access to private companies' metadata) is almost certainly quite close to 100%. You can read about how common usage terms are redefined in misleading ways by the NSA et al here: https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/wordgames#collect https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/wordgames#collect
- OedipusRex 8y ago"In a statement, Timothy Barrett, a spokesman at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which released the annual report, said the government “has not altered the manner in which it uses its authority to obtain call detail records.” " This is the issue, this is all legal.
- wpdev_63 8y agoIf you would like to make a difference and stop the unconstitutional mass surveillance of US citizens(and even non-citizens). Please visit fightforthefuture.org and become informed. Vote for privacy advocates and stop using/buying services and products that facilitate illegal surveillance. To stay up to date, visit eff.org. DISCLAIMER: I am in no affiliated with these organizations nor with their members.
- zerostar07 8y agoThey 'll have a lot less to collect this year with GDRP. Or maybe not
- JCSato 8y agoHow does GDPR relate to NSA surveillance. . .?
- mgamache 8y agoYes, in the long run maybe it reduces the amount of data sitting around in honeypots for both state and non-state actors, but I don't see much change this year (unless you see mass 'forget me' requests).
- Romanulus 8y agoIt doesn't.
- Taniwha 8y agowell it probably does if companies that acquiesce to NSA monitoring do business in Europe
- tptacek 8y agoWhat's the denominator of that fraction?
- tptacek 8y agoThe first search result on Google --- surely not accurate --- suggests the numerator is ~2 trillion.
- anf 8y agoWhat's a call record? Like a single phone call or an SMS? Pinging the tower doesn't count, does it?
- ship_it 8y agoWhy not? It's perfect way to signal.
- anf 8y agonvm, the article mentions it. cell phones check in with the tower while they are on, which is a way to track where someone has taken their cell phone. afaik, there's very limited privacy protections around this in the US because they are considered the business records of the cell company.
- jlgaddis 8y ago500M in all of 2017? Oh, come on! We found out that Verizon -- just Verizon -- was handing over "phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily" in June 2013. 500M might be an official number that they're willing to release but (without any way to prove it, obviously) I'm certain that the REAL number is much, much higher. For an organization who has vowed to "collect it all", it just doesn't seem likely that the NSA voluntarily went from "an estimated billions of records collected per day" to just 500M per year. Or perhaps it's just 500M according to their own made up definition of "collect"?
- reaperducer 8y agoMaybe it's 500M uniques?
- vuln 8y ago500 Million quries.
- randcraw 8y ago500M calls. The number of unique phones is less. The real question is what fraction of these calls had both parties inside the US. That's a different category than when one party is external/foreign — that's domestic espionage, which is a violation of law unless pre-authorized by the FISA court. THAT's the number I'd most like to know.
- loceng 8y agoThey could easily make it be an honest statement by simply having a different three-letter organization collecting the rest.
- trumped 8y agois that the organization that we don't know exist yet? a 2 letter name might work better... DB
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- sterlind 8y agoThe NSA plays the "Kevin Bacon" game, where selectors target an individual, their friends, friends of friends (2 degrees of separation out, iirc.) I suspect they're performing a full-take of the call contents as well, just not through the PINWALE/MARINA ingestion system. It's likely commingled with bulk traffic snarfed up by beam splitters at the telcos' NOCs, and separated on-demand from the TEMPORA buffer. At this point, I'm jaded enough to domestic mass-surveillance, I just want my money's worth. Russia successfully implanted DarkEnergy on domestic SCADA, nation-wide. Do we have that capability abroad? Prioritize foreign retailiatory offense, please! (hi @NSA if this shows up in XKS!)
- lern_too_spel 8y ago> I suspect they're performing a full-take of the call contents as well, just not through the PINWALE/MARINA ingestion system. What is the basis for this suspicion? If it were true, that's what people would have reported on from Snowden's millions of leaked documents instead of simply metadata (call data records).
- sterlind 8y ago"In the telcos, singlemode fiber is used to connect long distance switches, central offices and SLCs (subscriber loop carriers, small switches in pedestals in subdivisions or office parks or in the basement of a larger building). Practically every telco's network is now fiber optics except the connection to the home." [1] Specifically, AT&T has transitioned its PSTN backbone fully to SIP, which is a form of VoIP: "AT&T will exchange SIP traffic at the access border controller layer (i.e. SBCs, more specifically Acme Packet SBCs) via IP handoff at a few "strategic locations," directly peering with a select number of Tier 1 carriers. AT&T will also provide transit and direct termination through its network and support all roaming traffic to interwork with other wireless carriers" [2] So both voice and data are going over the same fiber lines, since it's all IP (which reduces costs considerably.) We know that Room 641A was one of many QUANTUM locations, where traffic was beam-split. [3] It seems from [4], that we have confirmation that TURMOIL and INCENSER snarf up PSTN as well as IP. Since all of that was working well before 2010, and we know TEMPORA acts as a buffer for high-volume stuff (fed by the Narus machines), and voice is IP now because of SIP, I feel reasonably confident it's getting stored at some duration at the exchanges. 1. https://www.lanshack.com/fiber-optic-tutorial-network.aspx https://www.lanshack.com/fiber-optic-tutorial-network.aspx 2. http://sip-trunking.tmcnet.com/topics/enterprise-voip/articles/109840-att-discusses-its-sip-peering-architecture.htm http://sip-trunking.tmcnet.com/topics/enterprise-voip/articl... 3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A 4. https://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2014/11/incenser-or-how-nsa-and-gchq-are.html?m=1 https://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2014/11/incenser-or-how-n...
- pasbesoin 8y agoNo equal representation before the law, for the "ordinary person". Private enterprise wants to use all this data to "maximize their returns" through "discretionary pricing" and even "discretionary offers" (you never even hear of the product, if you are not the targeted demographic). In other words, discrimination. As far as countering said discrimination? In the U.S., we couldn't even "fix" health care. One of the single most important "products" to "consumers". So yeah, all the rest of the arguments from "the powers that be", for all this data collection and "targeting", mean exactly crap to me. I just look at what they're doing. And I don't see ANY benefit for me, Joe Ordinary. Nor for Joe "Down On His Luck". Be born into the "wrong circumstances", or make one mis-step, experience one misfortune. And a "data-driven", "AI-enhanced" marketplace -- and perhaps "algorithmic" "law" enforcement -- will lock you into a positive feedback loop of downward pressure. The invisible hand of zero sum gain. And now we can add to all this systems like China's. Speak up, speak out about this, and your "social" score goes down. No higher education for your. No travel. So yeah, 500M call records. This feels like its going in exactly the right direction. Not. With all their data collection, why don't they pop the SWIFT records and some other collection likely pertinent to current suspected abuses of power and corruption pertaining to our leadership. You'd think such things would be critical to the safety of our democracy. Democra-what? Yeah.
- elbek89 8y agoSounds like a lot less than what I would expect normally
- elbek89 8y agoI was expecting the number will a lot more than this, given over 300M people in the US and whole year long
- neurobot 8y agoThis is not surprise for me.. in my country "government" got private line in telco for their uses, my senior told me when i was working in telco..
- DINKDINK 8y agoClapper committed perjury and walked away a free man: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=796gZxR9vVk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=796gZxR9vVk
- omeid2 8y agoTangentially related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry
- joering2 8y agoHe probably celebrated heavy on March 18. That's when statue of limitation expired. https://www.rt.com/usa/421041-clapper-perjury-congress-five-years/ https://www.rt.com/usa/421041-clapper-perjury-congress-five-... What a dirtbag.
- Steeeve 8y ago500M sounds like a lot. It's a gigantic number. But where call records are concerned it's not actually that big. I could pick out 100 mid-sized businesses and double that number readily. And that's not even thinking about text messages. 500M text messages. That's like 1 high school.
- cal5k 8y agoOne hypocrisy that I always find galling: while Americans (and really any of us living in the Western world) find bulk collection of metadata to be abhorrent, nobody raises an eyebrow at the expanding scope of KYC/AML legislation. I can't imagine anything more revealing as to the nature of a person than how they spend their money.
- giardini 8y agoIs there a chance, nay, is there not certainty, that some individual or group of persons in the NSA could or does, by selectively monitoring, personally gain tremendous wealth or influence? E.g., if I were an NSA employee and used my access to follow the phone calls of, say, the officers of Goldman-Sachs? What information, of financial value, could I possibly gain? What possibilities for gain await a a rogue organized group of such employees?
- omeid2 8y agoIt is called Information Asymmetry[0] in Contract Theory. NSA, KGB, FBI, Google, Facebook, any institution with access to large-scale privileged information– you name it, has at least one case to support the use of this advantage. Perhaps Nixon and Hoover case is the most obvious one.[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry [1] https://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/05/us/tape-shows-nixon-feared-hoover.html https://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/05/us/tape-shows-nixon-feare...
- willstrafach 8y agoIf you tried that, you would get a screen informing you that searching US Persons is forbidden. As it sounds intentional in your scenario, you would then be fired and be subject to further action.
- giardini 8y agowillstrafach says: "if you tried that, you would get a screen informing you that searching US Persons is forbidden. As it sounds intentional in your scenario, you would then be fired and be subject to further action." Nonsense! Firstly if the bad guys had the assistance of a systems administrator, they could modify privilege levels to suit their needs. No warnings would be issued and no forbidden access would be noted or logged. But more importantly, you speak as if there were only one way to "selectively monitor" or that, to monitor, one must use the programmed pathways into a system! But any decent system has realtime monitoring software, database patching tools and editors, realtime modification tools and in-house ad-hoc reporting software that is neither logged nor monitored. Furthermore, all systems have backups and backups can be stolen or copied. The backed up data can be restored and examined on systems other than the one from which it was collected. Snowden accessed "secure" data w/o timely detection. IIRC he also claimed that, had he the desire, he could have listened in on White House phone conversations w/o detection. This is all w/o the addition of rogue software/hardware or outside help. Were that available, the possible range of techniques would be much greater. You lack imagination.
- toufique 8y agoJust the metadata... wink wink
- cheschire 8y agoImagine what one could do with access to every phone conversation in terms of training a neural network. A properly trained network could easily identify code words among a network of certain individuals and then use the frequency of usage to identify potential windows of opportunity even if they didn't specify time windows over the phone. And do all of this without actually saving a single thing so it wouldn't be considered "collecting".
- kilotaras 8y agoUnless you have a big training corpus of terrorist conversations anything more than flagging "unnatural" phrases seems very far-fetched. And considering ratio of targets to civilians even that would be flooded with false positives.
- cbanek 8y agoIf only they could use that data to find out who these telemarketing scammers who constantly offer to sell me health insurance are.
- knowThySelfx 8y agoOnly 500M? With the Management Engine type spy chips installed in virtually all modern processors which runs our computers and phones, its all very easy. 500M is hogwash.
- occamrazor 8y agoAFAIK there is no evidence, in the Snowden docs or elsewhere, pointing to a wide-scale use of ME by NSA for bulk data collection.
- knowThySelfx 8y agoOf course Occamsrazor, not yet. It isn't gonna come by easily either. Time will tell, if it is or not.
- farseer 8y agoI would be very interested to know the tech they use to transcribe different languages and dialects into text for search and retrieval later on.
- anonu 8y agoDoesn't half a billion seem small?
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoI don't know; that's about 3 calls per person per year in the US. I don't think I make any more voice calls than that. Times is a-changin'.
- ernon 8y agoWhatsApp says they do 100M voice calls a day. Times is a-changin', but people still be a-talkin'. https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000625/WhatsApp-Calling-100-million-conversations-every-day https://blog.whatsapp.com/10000625/WhatsApp-Calling-100-mill...
- JoeAltmaier 8y agoIs NSA collecting WhatsApp calls? I thought the NSA collected regular POTS calls.
- moomin 8y agoIn the hunt for terrorist needles in the Internet haystack, the NSA is furiously piling on more hay.
- minusSeven 8y agoI guess we ultimately lost the battle because normal people don't give a shit about this anymore.... I am not sure what precedent this sets for the future.
- DaggerDagger 8y agoHey just a reminder the state is here to control you and protect property nothing more nothing less.