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Evidence that the NSA Is Storing Voice Content, Not Just Metadata
- humanspecies 13y agoWarning: this article does not present any evidence. Schneier is a great cryptologist, I've read his books, I've carried them around, I'm a big fan of his work. BUT. He's seriously lagging behind in his coverage of this scandal, it's like he's just reposting what others have already said and often stating the obvious. So the NSA has the capability to store voice? No, really? Like since 1940???? Sorry, Bruce, but this article is shit.
- ohwp 13y agoThe more I read about the subject the more I believe all this data is primary used for commercial reasons. What else is to gain from monitoring loads of targets without obvious security reasons?
- kaoD 13y agohttp://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/16/gchq-intercepted-communications-g20-summits http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/16/gchq-intercepted-co...
- motters 13y agoThe biggest component of espionage is always industrial espionage.
- malandrew 13y agoExactly. Personally, I'd be playing the currency markets if I had access to all this data. I'm curious how many people who are monitored are politicians and financiers (bankers/investors). The potential to abuse other economic markets relative to your own is enormous.
- greyman 13y agoBut if you investigate something and a new suspect emerges, you want to hear and analyze his calls in the past, don't you? And how can you achieve this if not by collecting all phone calls?
- PavlovsCat 13y agoBut if you investigate something and a new suspect emerges, you want to hear and analyze his calls in the past, don't you? I do? If they are suspect in a crime for specific reasons, why are those specific reasons not enough leads to follow? As Chomsky said, if you're so worried about terrorism, stop participating in it... as in, The Iraq "War" alone killed so many more people than 9/11, and nobody could even be arsed to look at the debris of the latter before destroying it. This is akin to a wolf saying the chicken need to tell him where they are at all times, to better protect them. Feel free to fall for that once, but then please join the rest of us in the real world.
- ianstallings 13y ago1. To stop dissent. More likely: 2. To award huge government contracts to the collectors and grow the institution at the same time.
- im3w1l 13y agoBlackmailing. Determining who is likely to whistle blow.
- eliasmacpherson 13y agoAnyone else getting this..? Technical Details www.schneier.com uses an invalid security certificate. The certificate expired on 18/06/13 11:55. The current time is 18/06/13 14:02. (Error code: sec_error_expired_certificate)
- ctdonath 13y agoFunny, I'm seeing a lot of threads about NSA violations which mention comparable "don't go to this site" warnings. I've seen more in the last few days than the prior several years.
- captn3m0 13y agoYup, its expired.
- pge 13y agoanother reminder of false security of certificates, because no one pays attention to them. Here's a security blog, so I will speculate that many of its readers are security conscious users, yet most probably went to the site anyway despite the security warning of an expired certificate.
- mitchty 13y agoWell an ssl cert that just expired is still encrypting data in flight. Most everyone that has dealt with security knows that people sometimes miss renewing the certs. Expired cert doesn't mean the site is now malicious.
- kaoD 13y agoBut it means that, if you accepted the insecure certificate, you might've accepted a MITM-crafted certificate. It doesn't mean that it's malicious, but it doesn't mean it's not.
- jessaustin 13y agoWhat's the threat model for this? Is the MITM going to subtly change Schneier's essay? Perhaps they're going to find out the lame password I use for stupid comment forms, which password (literally: it's a word) I've been using continuously for that purpose since 1994?
- alimoeeny 13y agosecurity certificate expired!
- doki_pen 13y agoCNN already broke this story in early May. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt9kRLrmrjc&feature=share http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt9kRLrmrjc&feature=share
- Mordor 13y agoSurely a compressed call recording is also 'metadata'?
- genwin 13y agoMajor media reported that the Boston bomber's wife's phone calls she made prior to the bombing were listened to, after the bombing.
- ck2 13y agoNSA is testifying right now in front of congress BTW Oh wait no, it's the Deputy Attorney General He says the 4th amendment doesn't apply to phone records. Footer says "NSA director to reveal terror plots stopped by surveillance"
- fnordfnordfnord 13y agohttp://www.c-span.org/flvPop.aspx?id=10737440108 http://www.c-span.org/flvPop.aspx?id=10737440108
- dpeck 13y agoLossy compression turns any data into metadata.
- diminoten 13y agoThis isn't evidence the NSA is storing voice content, this is Schneier saying, "One reason I used to discount the idea that the NSA was storing all phone conversations was that it'd be too much data but now I don't think it is." Not new evidence.
- sshconnection 13y agoI wouldn't be shocked to learn that their interpretation of "not listening in" does not include reading speech-to-text transcripts of conversations.
- OldSchool 13y agoAgreed. While speaker-independent speech recognition has ever-so-slowly progressed to the point where it only mostly sucks it's probably good enough to log a general transcript. Combine that with the temptation to store compressed audio at 1KB/sec and 1.5GB/year would likely easily cover fully documenting every conversation you have without "somebody listening in." This assumes 2000 minutes/month, way more than I use, but I need to average in females... Divide that by two if you simply log per-conversation instead of per-phone and we're at 0.75GB/year/person. I think we can safely assume that you have privacy only when speaking in-person, and that's if you're not under some sort of investigation. Otherwise, find a windy place outdoors (near a large body of water for dramatic effect) and mumble through your conversation even if you're just a Hipster preparing for next weekend's party.
- flogic 13y agoI suspect it means "We don't have a guy listening to your line in real time."
- mtgx 13y agoOr even better: "We said we aren't listening to your phone calls. We didn't say we aren't listening to a lot of phones, just (probably) not yours. Their word manipulations are sickening. I just wish all of this went to a trial already and to the Supreme Court. Let's see them lie through their teeth to the judges then, who will actually understand everything they're saying or avoiding saying (unlike most of the press, or people out there).
- gojomo 13y agoBut even if they lost at the Supreme Court, wouldn't they just appeal to the Secret Supreme Court?
- ChrisAntaki 13y agoYep! We've actually known this for years. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/03/wiring-big-brother-machine https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/03/wiring-big-brother-mac...
- wfunction 13y agoObama says [1] that if you're a "US person" (whatever that means), "The NSA is not listening to your phone calls." Does storing them for later use count as listening? [1] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57589732/obama-on-nsa-programs-americans-not-getting-the-complete-story/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57589732/obama-on-nsa-pr...
- dclowd9901 13y agoNot according to Clapper. I'm sure they're all on message with their phrasing. They are no doubt asserting that when you pick up a phone, someone is probably not listening to your phone call at that moment, as if we need assurance of that.
- jules 13y agoWhy would the NSA not be able to store all phone calls as audio? If we assume 30 minutes per person per day to store at compressed 20kbps at $0.12 per gigabyte per year (this is what you pay at Amazon), that costs $60 million to store for the data of a year's worth of phone calls of the entire population of the US. The budget of the NSA is more than $10 billion, so that's less than 0.6% of its budget. That is entirely doable. Note that I have grossly overestimated the cost here by assuming that price per gigabyteyear is what you pay Amazon, and 30 minutes per person per day is probably an overestimate, and the compression could be better too. The actual cost is probably closer to $10 million; less than one thousandth of the NSA's budget.
- noblethrasher 13y agoAlso, Amazon Glacier is only $0.01 per GB.
- brudgers 13y agoThe focus on content over meta-data is a red-herring. What you say during the phone call is just that...something you say. The meta-data shows what you do. A person browses the web at a doctor's office. Forty-five minutes later, that person calls their spouse, then an oncologist. A few days later, their spouse checks email from the oncologists office. An hour later a call is made to a diagnostic center by the first person. The next day, they call their mother and a surgeon. [see interview with Susan Landau: http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/12/more_intrusive_than_eavesdropping_nsa_collection# http://www.democracynow.org/2013/6/12/more_intrusive_than_ea... ] The conclusions which can be drawn from that meta-data are far more solid than can be drawn from listening in to any or all of the phone calls. Your phone calls don't show what time you get up in the morning, or when you get to work or walk the dog to the park. The meta-data does. The focus on the content of calls is 50 years out of date. The meta-data show the best time to burgle your house or fake your identity online. They show where you go and who you associate with. There's no need to know what you said.
- danbruc 13y agoI have to disagree. One could probably extract most of the information in your example from one of the phone calls and very likely even more information you can not extract from metadata alone. But there is of course also information you can only extract from metadata because it is never explicitly verbalized.
- anon51234 13y agoIn 1998 a colleague of mine received a DARPA request to develop a tape-based recording device that -- it was obvious from some quick calculations -- would be capable of archiving all voice communications going in and out of the country. We could think of no other application for that kind of technology, and assumed that the real client was the NSA. At the time, storing such a quantity of data was completely infeasible within the physical space & budgetary constraints of the proposed program was completely infeasible. We told them so, and the project went away. However, given that: 1.) They were trying to do this 15 years ago, and 2.) Both their budget and the technological state of the art has improved substantially since then, and 3.) The government these days seems happy to treat citizens' rights with the same general contempt as non-citizens' rights, given some creative re-definitions of terms and rubber-stamp lawyering... ...I would not be at all surprised to learn that a program like this was in fact well-established by this point.
- auctiontheory 13y agoMy experience has been that commercially available speech-to-text technology doesn't work very well on non-US-accented English. Maybe fixing that tech will be one benefit of PRISM. You know, just like we thank the Apollo space program for Velcro and pens that can write upside down.
- CamperBob2 13y agoHow about the simple fact that you don't need multiple data centers with capacities measured in exabytes to store "metadata"?
- Havoc 13y agoWell given that youtube can store such vast amounts of video the suggestion that the NSA is storing lots of voice doesn't seem like a massive stretch.
- ianstallings 13y agoI think what this points out clearly, and Schneier has been preaching this for years, is that we need to encrypt everything going forward.
- LoganCale 13y agoI agree, but good luck getting the average internet user to do so, and their refusal will prevent you from effectively doing so as well whenever you want to communicate with them.
- jes 13y agoSpeaking for myself, I'd like to encrypt the content of my communications as much as possible. But I can't control or encrypt the meta-data, such as numbers I dial, how long I talk, etc.
- mjt0229 13y ago> And, by the way, I hate the term "metadata." What's wrong with "traffic analysis," which is what we've always called that sort of thing? This has also been bugging me. Metadata is a very general term, and it doesn't explain what the NSA claims its doing (whether they're doing anything else is beside this particular point). Moreover, the use of such a general term seems like it's part of the propaganda, to make us less scared: "We're not collecting data, we're collecting meta-data." Well, it turns out that they are one and the same anyway.
- dougk16 13y agoLots of debate here on what is more powerful, the data or the metadata. I think in the case of voice content, a case can be made that the metadata is more powerful, simply because it's already parsed into a quantitative, objective format that's relatively easy to analyze en masse and find "suspicious" patterns within the public. With voice content, I don't think our natural language processing chops are up to par to deal with the massive amount of data and connect the dots in meaningful ways. Of course, if you're already targeting a specific individual, and you can get a human to listen to the voice content, the debate is academic - both kinds of data compliment each other and are equally powerful. Metadata still acts as a better "gateway drug" for narrowing down individuals though.
- peterwwillis 13y agoTo query the database, you need to know the phone number's area code is inside the united states (...? like that's fucking difficult?), then you must get "a further review" to see if they are "just expressing their first amendment rights", and then one of 20 analysts and 2 managers must approve it. Go check out all the things that are not protected by the first amendment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_excep... If we held people accountable for all the false statements of fact they make, FOX News would have been off the air years ago and all their newscasters thrown in jail. Basically, millions of people could be subject to database queries, considering how many loopholes there are. One example they cite using the 215 was the NSA provided a phone number to the FBI, the FBI served notice to the court to find out who the number belonged to, and they then arrested and convicted the guy for giving money to a foreign organization that the USA labels a terrorist organization. So don't do business with anyone who might know a group of freedom fighters.
- mikemoka 13y agoSo it turns out we should have actually listened to Shia LaBeouf back then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNRgP4FVDzA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNRgP4FVDzA