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NSA collecting phone records of millions of Americans daily
- jessaustin 13y agoI'm glad there are news organizations outside the USA.
- ISL 13y agoNothing like good 'ol homegrown reporting to ensure a free society. Assuming that the document is real: Thank you Guardian.
- dguido 13y agoPROTIP: the guy who wrote the article is a US-based journalist.
- gruseom 13y agoGreenwald lives in Brazil and in any case is pretty unrepresentative of US journalists.
- bcn 13y agoGlenn Greenwald, while being a US citizen is a resident of (i.e. typically 'based' in) Brazil according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Greenwald.
- redcircle 13y agoSince everyone is pointing out that he actually resides in Brazil most of the time: that is not by choice, but because the U.S. won't permit his significant other to enter the country. His reporting focus is always the US. He was a US constitutional lawyer before becoming a journalist.
- jessaustin 13y agohahaha you're such a PRO! Leaving aside the fact he's "based" in Brazil, I predict he'll sign on at a USA paper or broadcaster the very moment such become willing to give him the same editorial freedom to report on USA legal issues he now enjoys at The Guardian: i.e., that will never happen.
- rosser 13y agoNow that we know that every call is being slurped up by the surveillance-monster, people can no longer bury their heads in the "but they're only snooping on the 'bad guys'" sand. Maybe — though doubtfully — that will finally raise some broader public ire. EDIT: phrasing.
- LoganCale 13y agoIt won't. If it does, it will last a week or two and then people will move on and forget about it.
- carbocation 13y ago> Now that we know that every call is being slurped up by the surveillance-monster This order authorizes metadata about every call, explicitly not including names, addresses, financial information, or the actual contents of the call. From the order: > Telephony metadata does not include the substantive content of any communication, as defined by 18 U.S. §2510(8), or the name, address, or financial information of a subscriber or customer.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- carbocation 13y agoWhere in my post that you are replying to did I make any sort of value judgment about this order, or any inference about the value of metadata?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- rosser 13y ago"They" don't need to pull in the account details; they already have them.
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- bcn 13y agoThe order in a nutshell: IT IS HEREBY ORDERED that, the Custodian of Records shall produce to the National Security Agency (NSA) upon service of this Order, and continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this Order, unless otherwise ordered by the Court, an electronic copy of the following tangible things: all call detail records or "telephony metadata" created by Verizon for communications (i) between the United States and abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls. -http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/verizon-telephone-data-court-order http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/veri... It was approved (reapproved?) on April 25, and valid until mid July, and scheduled for declassification in (oops!) 2038. Interesting to note that this order was directed at Verizon, but presumably other carriers have received similar ones?
- charlieok 13y agoI'm actually surprised that it's only metadata and not a complete capture of the contents. Or will we learn later that there's another more secret order for that?
- pvnick 13y agoI assume that the cost and complexity of doing analysis on the millions (billions?) of phone calls daily limits even the government to metadata analysis, from which they likely issue orders for the contents of specific conversations based on statistical anomalies that may indicate whatever they're looking for.
- danbruc 13y agoRecording all US telephone calls costs only 2 million dollars for hard drives per year. Of course plus bandwidth costs, electricity and so on, but it is far less than at least I would have expect. Analyzing all the calls is of course a whole different story but I am not convinced it is not feasible or will become feasible in a not to distant future.
- Maxious 13y agoThe power cited is "50 USC § 1861 - Access to certain business records for foreign intelligence and international terrorism investigations" so the claim is just the metadata isn't a wiretap because it's a business record used for billing customers etc.
- wmf 13y agoThat's handled by Room 641A. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
- charlieok 13y agoWell that didn't take long, did it. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-admits-listening-to-u.s-phone-calls-without-warrants/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-admits-lis... HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5886686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5886686
- negativity 13y agoThe worst part is that this is almost completely unsurprising.
- LowKarmaAccount 13y agoThe NSA stopped caring about your privacy after 9/11 — just read about the demise of project ThinThread [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinThread
- hammock 13y agoThe NSA collecting call-detail records en masse is not news, and goes back to at least 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_call_database http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_call_database The news is that the Guardian has got a copy of an actual court order, so we can see the exact language used with the phone companies.
- jessaustin 13y agoHahaha I guess some people noticed what happened to Joe Nacchio.
- gyardley 13y agoSeriously. When the first executive to say 'no' to the government has his entire life put under a microscope and ends up going to prison for something 'unrelated' that they managed to dredge up -- yeah, people are going to draw the obvious conclusions.
- StavrosK 13y agoThis is why I believe we need simple, widespread encryption that is enabled by default. There are many applications which offer strong guarantees, such as Silent Circle (for whom I work), RedPhone, and even iMessage is pretty secure, from what I gather. Many chat clients have OTR support, SIP has ZRTP, etc. There are alternatives, unfortunately the really popular methods don't make security a priority.
- magicalist 13y agoEncryption wouldn't do you any good in this case. They're looking for who you are contacting, not what you're saying. You'd need to move all telephony onto something like Tor to get around this (and your ISP could still tell what end points you were connecting to, when you were connecting to them, etc).
- olefoo 13y agoReal-time synchronous communication ( like phone calls ) is pretty hard to hide, it uses bandwidth and takes up space on switches and needs low latency to work at all ( make a voip call to someplace that only has satellite internet to see how bad it can get ). If you're serious about hiding your communications; either build physical networks that you control and limit the amount of traffic visible to the public network ( i.e. trunking calls ) or send messages steganographically encrypted in pictures of your cat you post on Facebook.
- mahyarm 13y agoBecause they see no real market effect for 'real personal security'. People do care about privacy & security, but they don't physically understand how something like OTR works. Things like banking & tax apps putting in fake progress bars to make the app feel like it's 'more secure'. Or apps like snapchat that remove access for the standard user, but still leaves them on the phone after they are seen. Or your standard home lock.
- StavrosK 13y agoSure, but how much effort would it take to link in libotr if you're making a chat client? Not much, and, if it's popular, the gains are enormous.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- runjake 13y agoDirect PDF link: http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/709012/verizon.pdf http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/709012/verizon.pdf
- notdrunkatall 13y agoEveryone should see this relevant NYT short about William Binney, a 30 year veteran crypto-mathematician for the NSA who designed the program that is now being used by the NSA to spy on us all: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-security-agencys-domestic-spying-program.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/23/opinion/the-national-secur... His story was corroborated by Mark Klein, a former ATT employee who amassed evidence that the NSA was, with ATT's complicity, running a data-gathering node in room 641A of ATT's San Francisco building: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Klein This is not some conspiracy theory. It's happening, and no one seems to care.
- Retric 13y agoI remember my father saying he updated some win16 code to win32 bit code which did this while working for AT&T. (Copy meta data for every call) At the time he said nobody would say what the code was supposed to do just that that they needed it to be updated. As such I suspect this type of "Passive spying" has probably been going on for a long time. As a side note there are plenty of legitimate reasons to have this metadata for some phone numbers over the past X days. I suspect the original choice was simptly to give them everything vs trying to support these types of lookups after the fact. PS: AT&T was for a while providing a lot of government services for free simply because they could not get billing correct and it was nobody's job to fix it. Which is why I think this could have easily stared as a hack to solve a technical problem vs. the sort of big brother spying that pops up.
- notdrunkatall 13y agoAccording to Binney, the NSA's been mining data illegally since shortly before 9/11.
- DanBC 13y agoAccording to the EU parliament ECHELON was going on for a while. Monitoring of citizen phone calls was happening since at least the '90s. And that was the content of the calls, not just the addressing data. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON)
- Myrmornis 13y agoTo what extent do we know whether the same thing is happening in other countries? Do modern democracies tend to have laws that protect the public from this sort of indiscriminate surveillance?
- marshray 13y ago> To what extent do we know whether the same thing is happening in other countries? In many countries there is a single national telco which is by law or in practice a branch of the government. > Do modern democracies tend to have laws that protect the public from this sort of indiscriminate surveillance? Yes, to me this is a defining characteristic of a modern democracy. But they all have a process by which governmental authorities can bypass those protections in specific circumstances such as criminal investigations. This takes the form a court order or a subpoena. This document appears to be a blanket grant, by a court, of a near-real-time data pipe with no specificity whatsoever.
- rlx0x 13y agoThats hardly surprising, it is widely known or at least suspected that the NSA collects and stores all telephone communications, and not just metadata but the actual content as well. The capabilities of known and unknown US intelligence agencies are a state secret and the public will never know anything for sure. This gives you an insight over what the public thinks to know so far: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephone-calls-recorded-fbi-boston http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephon...
- tibbon 13y agoYet, no mention on front page of CNN. However there is "What breast-milk lollipops taste like" and "Before and after: Child stars"
- u2328 13y agoThey're in the entertainment-as-news business, not news. I'm surprised this hasn't become apparent to everybody yet. I haven't bothered to check them for for news in years now. It like expecting the Food Channel to cover hurricanes.
- tibbon 13y agoThe reason I check them is I figure they are a good 'average' of the news that the average american receives. I definitely know it is neither comprehensive, nor good reporting. But I'm sad for the fact that most Americans will hear more about honey-boo-boo (or whatever stupid entertainment stuff) on CNN than they will about NSA collecting their phone records.
- cantos 13y agoI agree their front page is overloaded with silly human interest stories and other fluff. However, this is an update to an older story that was apparently broken on May 11th 2006 by USA today. It was covered by CNN tv on that day: http://mediamatters.org/research/2006/05/11/despite-bipartisan-outcry-over-nsa-phone-call-d/135661 http://mediamatters.org/research/2006/05/11/despite-bipartis...
- jdp23 13y agoKind of like the cooking show on CNN Turkey during the protests there last week ...
- bobwaycott 13y agoDon't forget about the penguins.
- nwzpaperman 13y ago
- bbakkd 13y agoSo do we get any say in what our government is allowed to do?
- u2328 13y agoKinda, but not really.
- ihsw 13y agoYou get to choose which side of the punching bag you can punch every four years -- the right side or the left side.
- rhizome 13y agoDemand personal privacy protection legislation from your Congressional representatives. The only things preventing them from siphoning everything are some guideline-quality laws and PR kerfuffles.
- rayiner 13y agoSure. It's called voting. But you don't get to pretend that you have no say in what the government is allowed to do just because the majority of voters don't care about your pet issues. My mom doesn't care about electronic surveillance. Neither does my dad, or my wife. The vast majority of my friends (mostly non-techies), don't care. Just look at the success of Facebook and Google. People don't care about electronic privacy in general, and most don't try to draw strained distinctions between data they freely share with big corporations and data they think is okay for the government to have. A lot of them do care about preventing terrorism, however. So how can you sit there and pretend the will of the people isn't being served?
- calhoun137 13y agoIts nice to finally see a glenn greenwald article on the front page for once. I have been reading him every day for years and i would highly recommend his entire body of work to anyone who is not familiar with it.
- zwegner 13y agoAgreed, he's been the only political writer I've followed for years. His articles makes me depressed a lot of the time, but it's more because nobody seems to pay attention to him...
- ianhawes 13y agoNow if he would just update his headshot.
- Myrmornis 13y ago+1 Glenn Greenwald is excellent and it's very good news that he got the high profile position at the Guardian.
- obelos 13y agoGreenwald is great. Conor Friedersdorf and Radley Balko also do quality journalism on civil liberties issues.
- coenhyde 13y agoSomeone needs to find a way to make end to end encryption of phone calls a reality. I can think of technical solutions but it's another matter to get adoption. Also it can't only be an app. The phone can not be trusted. I think you'd need a small device that connects via wifi to your phone and then run some encryption over the top of that. It could be very small with only speaker and mic capabilities. Then you'd have an app on your phone to initial calls and display incoming calls.
- contingencies 13y agoYou could check out RedPhone @ https://whispersystems.org/#encrypted_voice https://whispersystems.org/#encrypted_voice Unfortunately right now if you use something like that you simply stick out immediately as interesting traffic to target...
- steve19 13y agoEnd-to-end while useful won't help this problem. They are keeping track of meta-data, so they are amassing a huge database of who every American associates with over the phone. This "meta data" is a huge part of Signals Intelligence and is very useful even if you can't hear the call itself (which is not to say they are not recording those as well). The only way around it would be a TOR like system (or a system running on TOR) to obfuscate who everyone talks to.
- sillysaurus 13y agoWell, technical solutions aren't the answer in cases like this. What we need is political buy-in. We need people to feel as we feel. If enough people felt that way, then this wouldn't be happening. And since not enough people feel that way, then no technical solution will matter, unfortunately.
- rdtsc 13y agoHa! Funny you mention it, because guess who needs protected and secure phone communication without leaking metadata? ... Yap it is them, the government. Behold NSA's own "Mobility Capability" spec http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/Mobility_Capability_Pkg_Vers_2_1.pdf http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/Mobility_Capability_Pkg_Vers_2_... In this spec they define what a mobile device would have to do to be available and good enough to handle government's classified data. How do you know what NSA knows? Usually by looking at what it suggests for government's use. They allegedly know what is already cracked, insecure and exploitable. (For ex. they suggest a specific pattern of erasing hard drives with sensitive data, they might say do it in 3 passes, so maybe assume they can recover data in less than 3 passes, so it gives you a glimpse into what's happening). So to cut to the chase, how does one hide metadata? Tunneling. You create a device that has some kind of a trusted boot mechanism, loads a trusted OS, and connecst to an exclusive VPN. Nothing enters or leaves the devices via a network that is not _the_ VPN network. Of course in their case the only metadata leaking is that this device is talking to government's central VPN server. Then there are TLS and SRTP channels created that encrypt the voice but metadata is presumably encrypted or hidden by the outer VPN. Now that is for the government. Now you'd need to set up a a few trusted VPN servers around the world make sure your phone connect to them and all the calls are routed through them as well. That way you could hide the metadata... and probably eventually land on some black list of sorts... ;-) I kid...only slightly [On a side note there is a known vulnerability in how compressed & encrypted voice data is transmitted that makes it reveal the contents, and that is by analyzing the statistical distribution of data (even encrypted) from that it is possible to deduce the message content -- http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/oakland08.pdf http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/oakland08.pdf so, make sure to play relatively loud music in the background , well shit by now I am sure I am on some list somewhere...]
- brown9-2 13y agoI hope that anyone in the US who is outraged realizes that the only real chance for change on this topic is in electing like-minded representatives to Congress, and getting everyone you know to vote the same way. Your current senator or representative likely supports this sort of action already, and it's not a violation of current law. It's not a party issue but rather a power issue, institutions that have it won't give it up on their own.
- sneak 13y agoThat won't work. This climate is decades old- by that method you'll be dead and buried before the needle ever moves. The only way to do it is to vote, yes— but with your tax dollars. You must emigrate.
- brousky 13y agoImagine you just took office as President, you could technically order this to stop. Would you really? If you do it, you'll piss off everyone in charge of homeland security. The second something bad happens, you know these people will do everything to undermine your authority. US elections are already about who's tough enough to protect the USA, imagine after that! Damn if you do, damn if you don't. Reality is the people's desire for safety and security is the reason surveillance like this exists. Unless the USA stops doing things that make other people want to kill innocent americans, homeland spying, as unacceptable as it may be, is probably the only way to provide that security. Not sure what the solution to shit like this is but I doubt it's like-minded representatives in Congress.
- tnorthcutt 13y agoUnless the USA stops doing things that make other people want to kill innocent americans Evil people, or people with evil intentions, exist. Period. Full stop. There will always be people who want to kill innocent Americans. Period. Full stop. Just as there will always be people who want to kill innocent $CITIZENS_OF_COUNTRY_NAME. Blaming an entire country for the evil actions and intentions of people who kill innocents is a copout of fantastic proportions. The existence of evil (killing innocents) does not excuse more evil (the government of the United States committing unmitigated mass-scale Orwellian spying on the citizens of the United States).
- contingencies 13y agoSo is AMDOCS, largely construed as an intelligence conduit for Mossad.
- marshray 13y agoSuch a comment is useless flamebait without any actual sources and data to back it up.
- contingencies 13y agoNo, it's truthful and should be respected.
- marshray 13y agoI'm saying that "largely construed" is weasel words that waste my time and is likely to create more heat than light. If there's something relevant to be learned from a similar scandalous AMDOCS/Mossad connection then by all means, link us to some reliable information. There has been no shortage of folks on net forums such as this one repeating "The US telcos are largely construed to be supplying data on domestic telephone calls to the NSA". But that just hasn't proven useful without specifics of the sort we saw revealed today.
- contingencies 13y agoEssentially complete metadata is required for outsourced billing. AMDOCS openly acknowledges that they provide outsourced billing to a slew of major telcos across the world. Many of us have experience that this even occurs outside of the physical premises of the telco ("hosted billing"). That much I know to be true, but you are welcome to draw your own conclusions or remain skeptical. The NSA interception thing is an additional concern, but given the European Parliament report in to Echelon from 2001, William Binney's recent reports from within the upper management of the NSA, the magnitude of their (black) budget, recent confirmatory comments by other LE parties, and the sheer magnitude of independently verifiable NSA construction projects in progress, it must be difficult to maintain much skepticism there.
- guelo 13y agoGlad we have the FISA court to make sure the NSA is only able to have access to every single phone record. Otherwise they might overreach.
- tantalor 13y agoThey could get more... they explicitly excluded the content of the communication. Telephony metadata does not include the substantive contant of any communication or the name, address, or financial information of a subscriber. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/verizon-telephone-data-court-order http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/06/veri...
- marshray 13y agoI wonder why they explicitly included trunk number? Or perhaps that's just boilerplate.
- pasbesoin 13y agoI'm glad we have the (remnants of) FISA, to create a audit / "paper" trail that can be used to bring these things to light. FISA has been sorely abused, but maybe it retained enough coherence to bring us, albeit "inadvertently", one last shred of accountability -- perhaps just in time. We'll have to see where this goes, now that one document is out.
- kevinSuttle 13y agoI love how the @Verizon and @VerizonWireless Twitter accounts are happily tweeting along promotions like nothing has happened. Also, the early termination fees are going to be laughed right into a class action suit after this little mishap.
- Duhck 13y agoGood news everyone, an entire generation or more of people don't make phone calls regularly. We use text based form of communication that are ideally encrypted. Also this data is just metadata, I see no reason they are tracking little jimmy and his four phone calls a week to mom.
- mtgx 13y agoWell, it's a good thing FBI is asking for web services wiretapping backdoors, then! http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/fbi-seeks-internet-backdoors/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/fbi-seeks-internet-...
- detcader 13y agoEveryone should realize one thing that makes this news slightly less scary, but still scary nonetheless: the order only applies to "Verizon Business Network Services", which is not the entirety of Verizon Communications. While this still means that the metadata from millions of phone calls by random people, possibly from phones not even on Verizon who were simply calling VBNS phones, have been vacuumed up by the government, it also means that not "all" Verizon phones are meta-tapped as the article seems to insinuate (tagline, picture caption). Glenn has done incredible commentary and reporting for many, many years; I hope this story will be only the beginning of his contributions and shake-ups to the discourse and activism against the U.S. surveillance oligarchy. Anyone who hasn't been reading his pieces whenever they come out are missing a phenomenon in human history.
- kalleboo 13y agoAlthough this only means that the order for VBNS was released - for all we know every telco could be under a similar order that just hasn't been leaked.
- superuser2 13y agoThe document included applies to "MCI Communications, Inc. d/b/a Verizon Business Network Services," My Verizon iPhone is with "Cellco Partnership d/b/a Verizon Wireless," a separate legal entity. Do we know that this order actually applies to individuals' phone calls? It seems the document would only apply to enterprise customers.
- detcader 13y agoI mean, the only phone calls ever made are between individuals; but yes, this order only applies to calls involving VBNS phones, not all Verizon phones in general as this article implies and many MSM outlets are saying. That makes it no less scary; VBNS has hundreds of thousands of customers and people who make calls to VBNS phones from unrelated also probably had their metadata sent to the government.
- superuser2 13y agoWouldn't an enterprise's call records be by definition "business records" and not subject to the same protection as the communications of the people? I'd imagine a lot of VBNS customers are already subject to Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations that require holding onto and turning over business records to interested parties.
- vixen99 13y agoIn a flash it's occurred to me that the sharper would-be perpetrators of antisocial acts might now decide not to use the telephone to communicate their dastardly plans. However all is not lost because the information collected will no doubt be put to good use.
- yread 13y agoGlenn Greenwald also commented on the article in a reply to a comment requesting "the other side" view : GlennGreenwald: @strangemartin > Can't help feeling I'm only getting one side of the story here. There's probably another court order that I've decided to hide from you that reads: "About that last order: just kidding. The government is only entitled to get the phone records of people about whom it has presented evidence of wrongdoing".
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]