6 ms·

Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?

145 points by glaugh 13y ago

gwgarry 13y ago
The more data they have the less they know. Most people with extreme voiced opinions will do nothing. Thinking doesn't mean doing and doing doesn't mean thinking.
- b6 13y ago
  The problem is that if you ever cross them, they have over 10 years worth of every type of your electronic communications to sift through for dirt. Not only do they have all that on you, which gives them some unknown but extremely worrisome level of insight about you, but also on all your friends and family and colleagues. And the likelihood of crossing them keeps growing.
  - gwgarry 13y ago
    Well I don't deal with them... so I don't care. They don't have to worry about me crossing them.
    - alan_cx 13y ago
      You will if they object to something you said.
    - dalke 13y ago
      The point is that you do deal with them, you just don't know about it. You also have to factor in the odds that there will be a false positive affecting you. Your name might be on a no-fly list, even though you aren't "crossing them." There might be "100% verified" data which links you to some event, as there was with Brandon Mayfield's fingerprints, even though that connection is 100% wrong. These are all low-probability events. Odds are, you don't have to worry. But every time you have to wait in line for security screening, remember that it's a false positive because they are worrying about you crossing them.
      - gwgarry 13y ago
        And that's why I have not traveled in years. You're going to harass me, I am not going to play. It's going to hurt the economy, but that's your fault, not mine.
        djKianoosh 13y ago
        but then you're not really free are you? free in the sense that you self-impose restrictions on travel. do you feel free? (honest question, cause your stance is intriguing)
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    the likelihood of crossing them keeps growing. They have finite funding and finite manpower. The hypothetical scenario in which half of America has "crossed" them, will not come to pass. When everyone is crossing them, they will be forced to triage.
- dalke 13y ago
  The more data they have, the easier it is for mistakes to occur, the easier it is for those mistakes to affect people detrimentally.
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  Prosecutors in the states are known to withhold exculpatory evidence. It's not about knowing, it's not even about what you can prove, it's about what they can pin on you - what they can get people to believe about you. "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." - attributed to Richelieu, Cardinal De That's the fear - (or a large part of it anyway.) You don't even have to cross them for them to do it - not in any significant way. Maybe you slight a cop and he decides to screw you if he can. Maybe you're just a figure on someone's KPIs. You don't have to cross someone - not really - for your desires to conflict.
moxie 13y ago
My recollection of the NSA's legal interpretation is that they feel they don't need a warrant to record everyone's traffic; they only need a warrant for a human to subsequently access those recordings. The twist this puts on "having nothing to hide" is that it means you have to trust everything you say now will forever be considered benign, rather than just at this particular moment in history. Open Whisper Systems is a project I work on to help untap your phone: http://www.whispersystems.org http://www.whispersystems.org
- rayiner 13y ago
  It's not a completely ridiculous legal interpretation. The 4th amendment is implemented via the exclusionary rule, which excludes evidence from a court case obtained from an unreasonable search. As a matter of history and practice (the exclusionary rule predates the Constitution), the 4th amendment is in many ways a rule governing criminal procedure more than it is a privacy rule per se. Now, today the prevailing view is that the 4th amendment is that illegal searches are unconstitutional even if the exclusionary rule can't be invoked (see, Bivens v. Six Unknown Named FBI Agents), but there is still this contour in the law that distinguishes collecting data from trying to bring it into evidence. The argument here is probably wrong, but not ridiculous.
  - gwgarry 13y ago
    Liberal democracies don't particularly care about principles. I guess they are just a rhetorical device with which the masses beat the government upside the head. The government officials are numb to this.
  - moxie 13y ago
    To be clear, I don't actually think it's worth trying to influence what is or isn't the legal interpretation that we might desire. We can't blame power for establishing systems of control, just as we can't blame a tiger for mauling a zoo keeper: it's the nature of the thing. It's what we should expect, no matter how much time we spend coaxing or training it. I'd much rather invest energy into developing solutions that allow us to communicate securely, rather than investing energy into asking those with power not to monitor our insecure communication.
InternalRun 13y ago
This thing is always coming up, will someone show me some actual evidence and I am not talking some crack pot agent turned whistle blower saying "THAT DO THIS AND THAT", not ECHELON and not the base they are building. I am talking evidence. Logging every single thing? Everything? The data storage that would be required for that is insane. All of these "whistle blowers" have something in common, they are making money off of this, from books to interviews. I am not about to trust them any more than I am their previous employers. Why is it I am ment to question everything the US does but I am ment to blindly trust anyone who says they are doing something like this?
- coldtea 13y ago
  There has been publicised information (by major news outlets) that points to this for a long time. And Echelon is also not some crackpot's dream. What's to doubt? Even the CIA CTO said at some point that the "record everything they can and keep it forever": http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/cia-gus-hunt-big-data_n_2917842.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/cia-gus-hunt-big-da... The CIA Chief Tech Officer. What more proof do you need? As if they're gonna let you have a peak at their data centers! If you don't believe they do it at whatever scale it's possible at this point, then you're delusional. And, no, "The data storage that would be required for that" (logging every call) is not insane by any means. Even a medium-sized corporation could afford it nowadays, and we're talking about the government here.
joshuahedlund 13y ago
If the government is already recording everything, why do they have to reach out and reprogram cards to get access to specific people? [1] I think the illegal things the government does to get more access is evidence they don't have total access at this time. [1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/verizon-rigmaiden-aircard http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/verizon-rigmaiden-a...
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  That just shows that the FBI don't have access to everything all the time, which is probably true. I've worked for groups before where you'd know that someone else in the same group had the data you were interested in but it was less bother to go and get it yourself than it was to make a freedom of information request and wait a month for that to process. One of the few advantages that smaller groups have against big systems is that big systems don't totally trust other people in their own systems. Even the police classify their information hierarchically - maybe this bit of information only needs to be known by inspectors in firearms units, etc ,etc.
  - dwiel 13y ago
    Just because they ask for access doesn't mean they don't already have it. It just means they haven't collected it in a way that can be used in a court case.
jrockway 13y ago
I kind of doubt that they have every phone conversation recorded and archived for all time. But I'm not sure what exactly the incentive is to tell people that they do. If they said, "no, we can't get any of that", it would encourage criminals to be sloppy (and us citizens to not scrutinize them too much). But they say, "yeah, we have everything", which encourages the criminals to use strong cryptography. (And if they've broken AES, they're probably not going to publicly reveal that to our enemies by using it against you in your drug possession case.) It just doesn't make much sense.
danbruc 13y ago
The first question that comes to my mind - is this technically and economically possible? How many minutes does the average person spend on the phone per day? I found some numbers in the range from 6 to 28 minutes per day. Let's just pick 15 minutes. This times the population of the states (313.9 million) divided by two yields 39,237,500 hours per day. Storing this at 8 kbps requires about 128.5 TiB per day or 45.8 PiB per year. At $40 per TiB this is less than 2 million dollars per year. So technically and economically this should actually be possible. But that is just storing. Performing speech recognition, analyzing the data and extracting information is probably the much harder task and I would guess that it is still infeasible to do this with all phone calls.
- fchollet 13y ago
  No doubt that intelligent processing on that scale will be feasible in time, and most likely soon. Opinion surveillance at the scale of a nation is too strategically important. And when it will start happening, it will also apply to today's data.
  - danbruc 13y ago
    Yes, that seems to be no question - population growth is mostly linear or even sublinear and nobody is able to produce more than 24 hours of speech per day. If computational power keeps growing exponentially and algorithms keep getting better and better, it is only a question of time.
  - hayksaakian 13y ago
    > And when it will start happening, it will also apply to today's data. I hope everyone else noticed this as well. Even if the tech to do crazy analysis does not exist today, the tech to record all the data for future use is quite real.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      Well, the statute of limitations hasn't changed, so just cross your fingers the march of technology isn't too fast... ;)
beachstartup 13y ago
my first thought was, "what's a recording?" is buffering packets in a network device a recording? using metadata for traffic/performance analysis?
acabal 13y ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again: anonymity online and encrypted communications are one of the most important problems we're going to going to face in the coming decades. Hackers should be working on those, not clever ways to serve ads or geolocating your latest locally-sourced coffee. If you don't believe the US is already permanently archiving vast swaths of communication, it's not a big leap of imagination to picture it happening in five or ten years. Likewise the government might not have the computer power to analyze those archives today, but in five or ten years, I'd bet on it. Some people don't mind that the government stores their emails. "I'm fine with it because I know they're going to catch the bad guys" or "I'm fine with it because I have nothing to hide". Those are certainly powerful (though flawed) arguments for the situation today. Those people are perhaps picturing filing cabinets in some dank warehouse filled with paper printouts of their emails, which due to space constraints will be shredded or forgotten in ten years. The reality is that thanks to technology, what we say today is being stored and archived for-ev-er and can be indexed and retrieved easily and indefinitely. Why does that make a difference? Because today, what you say and do might be lawful. But laws and societies change over time, and the government will still be able to go back and dig up what you said decades ago and use it against you. That's really what scares me--because today, I, like most people, don't have much to hide. But who knows what laws or culture will be like in 20 years, and what can be used against me that I said so very long ago? Can you imagine working at the WTC and having a bad day, and jokingly sending an email to a coworker about bombing the place because you're so mad. 9/11 happens a year later, the government looks in its archives for the email you sent, and in a post-9/11 frenzy sends you to Guantanamo to "await trial". Or it doesn't even have to go that far; some government spokesperson lets your name slip in an interview as a "suspect" and the media attention you'll get will forever ruin your life even if the government does nothing.
- wskinner 13y ago
  Strongly agree. Aside from the first-order benefits of encryption becoming ubiquitous (government can't read my) stuff, there are side effects that may be even more important. If everyone is using Tor, for example, there is a lower probability that any given Tor user is engaging in activity the government does not approve of. And the more "legitimate" users there are, the harder it is to criminalize users.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
SeanDav 13y ago
Probably voicing an opinion in this thread might get you investigated at some point in the future....
- mindcrime 13y ago
  In that case, let me be the first to say: Dear CIA, FBI, NSA, DIA, DHS, TSA, etc: Fuck you. Thanks, Mindcrime I don't give a shit if they investigate me or not. One can't live one's entire life in fear, damnit. Either principles mean something and we need to stand up for and defend them, or not.
pwnna 13y ago
Are skype calls being recorded now too? They had pretty good security until recently. The independent security review they posted on their site is like.. 8 years old now.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Gravityloss 13y ago
If it is happening, it might some day be culturally accepted. There are steps after that. Are you allowed access to your own history? One big business aspect of gmail is that - easy searchability of your whole email history. It will contain stuff written by other people as well. Will there be some policy of email expiration? In the end we get to something like in science fiction. Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief has externalized common memory and also your private memories that can be recovered. Also pieces of them that can be shared directly. Such centralized systems have a whole host of new security problems.

145 points by glaugh 13y ago

The more data they have the less they know. Most people with extreme voiced opinions will do nothing. Thinking doesn't mean doing and doing doesn't mean thinking.

b6 13y ago
The problem is that if you ever cross them, they have over 10 years worth of every type of your electronic communications to sift through for dirt. Not only do they have all that on you, which gives them some unknown but extremely worrisome level of insight about you, but also on all your friends and family and colleagues. And the likelihood of crossing them keeps growing.
- gwgarry 13y ago
  Well I don't deal with them... so I don't care. They don't have to worry about me crossing them.
  - alan_cx 13y ago
    You will if they object to something you said.
  - dalke 13y ago
    The point is that you do deal with them, you just don't know about it. You also have to factor in the odds that there will be a false positive affecting you. Your name might be on a no-fly list, even though you aren't "crossing them." There might be "100% verified" data which links you to some event, as there was with Brandon Mayfield's fingerprints, even though that connection is 100% wrong. These are all low-probability events. Odds are, you don't have to worry. But every time you have to wait in line for security screening, remember that it's a false positive because they are worrying about you crossing them.
    - gwgarry 13y ago
      And that's why I have not traveled in years. You're going to harass me, I am not going to play. It's going to hurt the economy, but that's your fault, not mine.
      - djKianoosh 13y ago
        but then you're not really free are you? free in the sense that you self-impose restrictions on travel. do you feel free? (honest question, cause your stance is intriguing)
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  the likelihood of crossing them keeps growing. They have finite funding and finite manpower. The hypothetical scenario in which half of America has "crossed" them, will not come to pass. When everyone is crossing them, they will be forced to triage.
dalke 13y ago
The more data they have, the easier it is for mistakes to occur, the easier it is for those mistakes to affect people detrimentally.
6d0debc071 13y ago
Prosecutors in the states are known to withhold exculpatory evidence. It's not about knowing, it's not even about what you can prove, it's about what they can pin on you - what they can get people to believe about you. "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." - attributed to Richelieu, Cardinal De That's the fear - (or a large part of it anyway.) You don't even have to cross them for them to do it - not in any significant way. Maybe you slight a cop and he decides to screw you if he can. Maybe you're just a figure on someone's KPIs. You don't have to cross someone - not really - for your desires to conflict.

moxie 13y ago

My recollection of the NSA's legal interpretation is that they feel they don't need a warrant to record everyone's traffic; they only need a warrant for a human to subsequently access those recordings. The twist this puts on "having nothing to hide" is that it means you have to trust everything you say now will forever be considered benign, rather than just at this particular moment in history. Open Whisper Systems is a project I work on to help untap your phone: http://www.whispersystems.org http://www.whispersystems.org

rayiner 13y ago
It's not a completely ridiculous legal interpretation. The 4th amendment is implemented via the exclusionary rule, which excludes evidence from a court case obtained from an unreasonable search. As a matter of history and practice (the exclusionary rule predates the Constitution), the 4th amendment is in many ways a rule governing criminal procedure more than it is a privacy rule per se. Now, today the prevailing view is that the 4th amendment is that illegal searches are unconstitutional even if the exclusionary rule can't be invoked (see, Bivens v. Six Unknown Named FBI Agents), but there is still this contour in the law that distinguishes collecting data from trying to bring it into evidence. The argument here is probably wrong, but not ridiculous.
- gwgarry 13y ago
  Liberal democracies don't particularly care about principles. I guess they are just a rhetorical device with which the masses beat the government upside the head. The government officials are numb to this.
- moxie 13y ago
  To be clear, I don't actually think it's worth trying to influence what is or isn't the legal interpretation that we might desire. We can't blame power for establishing systems of control, just as we can't blame a tiger for mauling a zoo keeper: it's the nature of the thing. It's what we should expect, no matter how much time we spend coaxing or training it. I'd much rather invest energy into developing solutions that allow us to communicate securely, rather than investing energy into asking those with power not to monitor our insecure communication.

InternalRun 13y ago

This thing is always coming up, will someone show me some actual evidence and I am not talking some crack pot agent turned whistle blower saying "THAT DO THIS AND THAT", not ECHELON and not the base they are building. I am talking evidence. Logging every single thing? Everything? The data storage that would be required for that is insane. All of these "whistle blowers" have something in common, they are making money off of this, from books to interviews. I am not about to trust them any more than I am their previous employers. Why is it I am ment to question everything the US does but I am ment to blindly trust anyone who says they are doing something like this?

coldtea 13y ago
There has been publicised information (by major news outlets) that points to this for a long time. And Echelon is also not some crackpot's dream. What's to doubt? Even the CIA CTO said at some point that the "record everything they can and keep it forever": http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/cia-gus-hunt-big-data_n_2917842.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/cia-gus-hunt-big-da... The CIA Chief Tech Officer. What more proof do you need? As if they're gonna let you have a peak at their data centers! If you don't believe they do it at whatever scale it's possible at this point, then you're delusional. And, no, "The data storage that would be required for that" (logging every call) is not insane by any means. Even a medium-sized corporation could afford it nowadays, and we're talking about the government here.

joshuahedlund 13y ago

If the government is already recording everything, why do they have to reach out and reprogram cards to get access to specific people? [1] I think the illegal things the government does to get more access is evidence they don't have total access at this time. [1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/verizon-rigmaiden-aircard http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/verizon-rigmaiden-a...

6d0debc071 13y ago
That just shows that the FBI don't have access to everything all the time, which is probably true. I've worked for groups before where you'd know that someone else in the same group had the data you were interested in but it was less bother to go and get it yourself than it was to make a freedom of information request and wait a month for that to process. One of the few advantages that smaller groups have against big systems is that big systems don't totally trust other people in their own systems. Even the police classify their information hierarchically - maybe this bit of information only needs to be known by inspectors in firearms units, etc ,etc.
- dwiel 13y ago
  Just because they ask for access doesn't mean they don't already have it. It just means they haven't collected it in a way that can be used in a court case.

jrockway 13y ago

I kind of doubt that they have every phone conversation recorded and archived for all time. But I'm not sure what exactly the incentive is to tell people that they do. If they said, "no, we can't get any of that", it would encourage criminals to be sloppy (and us citizens to not scrutinize them too much). But they say, "yeah, we have everything", which encourages the criminals to use strong cryptography. (And if they've broken AES, they're probably not going to publicly reveal that to our enemies by using it against you in your drug possession case.) It just doesn't make much sense.

danbruc 13y ago

The first question that comes to my mind - is this technically and economically possible? How many minutes does the average person spend on the phone per day? I found some numbers in the range from 6 to 28 minutes per day. Let's just pick 15 minutes. This times the population of the states (313.9 million) divided by two yields 39,237,500 hours per day. Storing this at 8 kbps requires about 128.5 TiB per day or 45.8 PiB per year. At $40 per TiB this is less than 2 million dollars per year. So technically and economically this should actually be possible. But that is just storing. Performing speech recognition, analyzing the data and extracting information is probably the much harder task and I would guess that it is still infeasible to do this with all phone calls.

fchollet 13y ago
No doubt that intelligent processing on that scale will be feasible in time, and most likely soon. Opinion surveillance at the scale of a nation is too strategically important. And when it will start happening, it will also apply to today's data.
- danbruc 13y ago
  Yes, that seems to be no question - population growth is mostly linear or even sublinear and nobody is able to produce more than 24 hours of speech per day. If computational power keeps growing exponentially and algorithms keep getting better and better, it is only a question of time.
- hayksaakian 13y ago
  > And when it will start happening, it will also apply to today's data. I hope everyone else noticed this as well. Even if the tech to do crazy analysis does not exist today, the tech to record all the data for future use is quite real.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Well, the statute of limitations hasn't changed, so just cross your fingers the march of technology isn't too fast... ;)

beachstartup 13y ago

my first thought was, "what's a recording?" is buffering packets in a network device a recording? using metadata for traffic/performance analysis?

acabal 13y ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again: anonymity online and encrypted communications are one of the most important problems we're going to going to face in the coming decades. Hackers should be working on those, not clever ways to serve ads or geolocating your latest locally-sourced coffee. If you don't believe the US is already permanently archiving vast swaths of communication, it's not a big leap of imagination to picture it happening in five or ten years. Likewise the government might not have the computer power to analyze those archives today, but in five or ten years, I'd bet on it. Some people don't mind that the government stores their emails. "I'm fine with it because I know they're going to catch the bad guys" or "I'm fine with it because I have nothing to hide". Those are certainly powerful (though flawed) arguments for the situation today. Those people are perhaps picturing filing cabinets in some dank warehouse filled with paper printouts of their emails, which due to space constraints will be shredded or forgotten in ten years. The reality is that thanks to technology, what we say today is being stored and archived for-ev-er and can be indexed and retrieved easily and indefinitely. Why does that make a difference? Because today, what you say and do might be lawful. But laws and societies change over time, and the government will still be able to go back and dig up what you said decades ago and use it against you. That's really what scares me--because today, I, like most people, don't have much to hide. But who knows what laws or culture will be like in 20 years, and what can be used against me that I said so very long ago? Can you imagine working at the WTC and having a bad day, and jokingly sending an email to a coworker about bombing the place because you're so mad. 9/11 happens a year later, the government looks in its archives for the email you sent, and in a post-9/11 frenzy sends you to Guantanamo to "await trial". Or it doesn't even have to go that far; some government spokesperson lets your name slip in an interview as a "suspect" and the media attention you'll get will forever ruin your life even if the government does nothing.

wskinner 13y ago
Strongly agree. Aside from the first-order benefits of encryption becoming ubiquitous (government can't read my) stuff, there are side effects that may be even more important. If everyone is using Tor, for example, there is a lower probability that any given Tor user is engaging in activity the government does not approve of. And the more "legitimate" users there are, the harder it is to criminalize users.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

SeanDav 13y ago

Probably voicing an opinion in this thread might get you investigated at some point in the future....

mindcrime 13y ago
In that case, let me be the first to say: Dear CIA, FBI, NSA, DIA, DHS, TSA, etc: Fuck you. Thanks, Mindcrime I don't give a shit if they investigate me or not. One can't live one's entire life in fear, damnit. Either principles mean something and we need to stand up for and defend them, or not.

pwnna 13y ago

Are skype calls being recorded now too? They had pretty good security until recently. The independent security review they posted on their site is like.. 8 years old now.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

Gravityloss 13y ago

If it is happening, it might some day be culturally accepted. There are steps after that. Are you allowed access to your own history? One big business aspect of gmail is that - easy searchability of your whole email history. It will contain stuff written by other people as well. Will there be some policy of email expiration? In the end we get to something like in science fiction. Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief has externalized common memory and also your private memories that can be recovered. Also pieces of them that can be shared directly. Such centralized systems have a whole host of new security problems.