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NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst
- twoodfin 13y agoNo, says an unnamed NSA "colleague" of a former analyst. Say what you like about Snowden, but at least some of his claims have been backed up by evidence. What have these guys got? Why not name names?
- ToothlessJake 13y agoA stay in a penitentiary helped managed by SAIC[1]. [1] http://www.alanco.com/news_040104.asp http://www.alanco.com/news_040104.asp
- kennywinker 13y agoBecause then they'll have to flee the country like that "traitor" Snowden? Not saying it wouldn't be the right thing to do, but I am saying it would definitely come at a cost to them and their friends.
- twoodfin 13y agoWhy? A colleague of Tice's told him a few weeks ago that every domestic communication is being recorded. Tice is now a private citizen, and he has every right to tell us that colleague's name. But he won't, and I suspect that the reason is that his claim is fanciful.
- kennywinker 13y agoThat's definitely possible. But it's also possible he doesn't want to out his friend because he's a decent guy. You know we would all think this guy was a scumbag if he outed his friend/colleague at the NSA who would likely suffer for it. Without hard evidence it's hard to believe him, you're right. But not naming his source doesn't effect his credibility negatively in my eyes. It's equally likely he's not naming his source because he's a nice person, as it is because there is no source.
- zxcdw 13y ago> But he won't, and I suspect that the reason is that his claim is fanciful. Do you find this more probable than the fact that by giving out a name he'd set up his friend between a rock and a hard place?
- srean 13y agoIf rights were really respected we wouldnt have this, now I am at loss for words so am settling with clusterF#$%, to begin with.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- rhizome 13y agoRecent history tells us there's proof out there, and that it typically follows a denial by Obama or the intelligence communities.
- kennywinker 13y agoI get your emotional position, but this is just some bad logic. "If the government denies it, it must be true" is not a useful tool. How about "recent history says that this kind of thing could potentially be true, and that the government wouldn't admit if it was."
- rhizome 13y agoThanks for the condescension, but you misunderstood me: we'll find out after the denial, when the doc release occurs. The denial doesn't substitute for the doc release.
- bigiain 13y ago"Why not name names?" Because they can see what's happening to Snowden and Manning? From my outside perspective, it seems Obama's "whistle blower" rhetoric was pure electioneering lies…
- ToothlessJake 13y agoPersistent targeting, one way or another, by drones managed by SAIC[1]. [1] http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/06/14/news-saic-wins-95-million-drone-management-contrac/ http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/06/14/news-saic-wins-95-mil...
- ToothlessJake 13y agoDigitally stalked due to dissent by for-profit "Domain Awareness Centers" run by SAIC[1]. [1] http://oaklandwiki.org/Domain_Awareness_Center http://oaklandwiki.org/Domain_Awareness_Center
- alan_cx 13y agoIn many ways, hard evidence is the last thing a whistle blower wants. Its the evidence that scares the authorities. While its just "claims", you go free. You can be mocked and dismissed as a crank. If you have evidence, well, Snowden, Manning, ...
- martindale 13y agoThe "former analyst" in question is Russell Tice, who was terminated by the NSA in 2005 after "publicly urging Congress to pass stronger protections for federal intelligence agency whistleblowers facing retaliation" [1]. There's an interesting exchange from then-director of NSA special access programs Renee Seymour to Tice warning him against testifying on the NSA programs [2] about a half year later. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice#Whistleblower http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice#Whistleblower [2]: http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2006/04/nsa010906.pdf http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2006/04/nsa010906.pdf
- twoodfin 13y agoThat letter seems eminently reasonable to me.
- martindale 13y agoI agree. It's interesting from a historical context.
- arh68 13y agoSo if neither intelligence committee (HPSCI, SSCI) has the clearances, who does? How many Congressmen have clearance to be even briefed on programs classified for _both_ military and intelligence 'purposes'? It surprises me they'd so blatantly seek specific, arbitrary classifications to prevent _the legislators_ from learning the truth.
- kennywinker 13y agoThey throw out the claim (~4:10) the facility in utah could store "about 100 years of the world's communications". Has anyone done the math? How much could that facility store. If they were indeed recording word-for-word content, how many days/months/years could they store?
- fixxer 13y agoI think the metadata storage requirement is reasonable. These capabilities are already part of basic billing systems at the telcos, aren't they?
- er0k 13y agohttp://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/07/24/blueprints-of-nsa-data-center-in-utah-suggest-its-storage-capacity-is-less-impressive-than-thought/#comment-10697 http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/07/24/blueprint...
- kennywinker 13y agoVery interesting. The tl;dr seems to be: nobody knows for sure, but yes... it could totally be used for full content storage for some length of time.
- acqq 13y agoNo, it's not "nobody knows for sure." If you do the right math and don't assume that they have the storage technology not available to the rest of the world (which is a reasonable assumption) it's obvious that the data storage in an accessible way inside that center has an upper bound of an order of around one exabyte (1e18) (a million terabytes). So it's even more probable that it's less, say 0.2 EB. Now somebody here claims it's around 1e7 B compressed for an hour of phone talk (not transcribed only compressed). That gives 2e10 hours stored. Storing it for 2e8 Americans there's space for 100 hours per person. But they also want the world, not only Americans.
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- fixxer 13y agoNice to see somebody pointing out the obvious bullshit regarding the Utah facility's real purpose (content storage, not metadata). What kind of iron do you need to run NLP on a day's worth of content (let's limit "content" to voice transcriptions from phone calls)? Suppose I want to pick out "bomb" in near real-time? How many $billions for total information awareness? Even the best algo is going to produce false positives. At nation scale, that is going to be a massive QA/QC effort.
- clicks 13y agoI'm curious about the storage media they might have... is it just plain old rotational harddrives? Who made them -- Seagate? Western Digital? It's curious that no word has come out from that front -- "wow, this customer is requesting a _LOT_ of storage devices... like, more storage space than what is available in the world". And really, because of this I think the idea that they might have some in-house innovation is not so far-fetched. We started hearing a lot about inPhase Technologies and such about DVD-sized discs that could store upwards of 6 terabytes back almost 10 years ago, but it amounted mostly to vapourware. We do now have confirmed information from Seagate that they'll start shipping out laptop-sized 2.5" rotational drives that will be able to store around ~60 TB of data within the next 2-3 years. Perhaps NSA has been secretively working with them, if not just producing the devices for themselves?
- sliverstorm 13y agoForget statements from Seagate or WD. Just look at their bottom line.
- llamataboot 13y agoThe NSA has quite a bit of in-house hardware manufacturing capability, but I don't know if they use it to make storage media.
- MichaelGG 13y agoUncompressed, 1 hour of phone audio is only ~29MB (8KB/sec*3600s/h). Compressing it for storage can send that way down. Let's assume to 6MB. If every 300M Americans talked for an hour a day, that's only 2TB a day for call audio. Edit: That's only one-way, so double. But compression can eliminate most of that, as there's usually only audio on one side of a call at a time. Anyways, even if I'm right within a factor of 10 or so, it doesn't really seem like a suspiciously high volume of disks. (Disclaimer: I'm very drowsy just been woken up due to a datacenter coolant failure so maybe I miscalculated it.)
- MattyRad 13y ago>We have turned intelligence into a regulated industry in a way that none of our allies, even in Europe, have done. We have all three branches of government involved in overseeing the activities of the NSA... That a whistleblower had to reveal the programs, that Congress was largely unaware that any such programs existed, and that NSA personnel are content with lying to Congress about the programs pretty well contradicts that claim. Still, glass half full, I suppose it's somewhat encouraging that PBS is reporting on this.
- llamataboot 13y agoSo it's now in the realm of maybe-to-probable that the NSA has every domestic phone call on tape as well as some non-trivial sized chunk of all emails sent? Plus for sure has all metadata they can get their hands on? Plus cable taps on most (all?) internet backbones?
- Sven7 13y agoMaybe SETI should try a SETI@NSA
- spyder 13y agoAre you suggesting that NSA should wire-trap the aliens too? :)
- VerilyForsooth 13y agoNo, it's not. Really. The only people who believe they are collecting the content of calls, as well as all browser traffic etc, of EVERYONE, are demented and braindead conspiracy theorists. Of which there happen to be many in the tech community.
- sixothree 13y agoPlus anything municipal agencies are collecting. Eg. License plates, etc.
- EdSharkey 13y agoOF COURSE they'd store the contents of our communication, it would be foolish for them not to now that they have the means! The algorithms for speech to text are probably near perfect by now, especially since they have SO MUCH sample data to work with. I doubt you'd need to store the raw audio data, just turn the transcript into full text "metadata". The main issue is that our information is being stored - INDEFINITELY. You've got to be naive to think this data won't be abused eventually. It will be sold, or it will be used to control. Reading between the lines in some of these news stories, I have to believe that all the walls between the civil and law enforcement agencies are coming down, and it's all one big data mart FTW. We must bar them from generally capturing and storing information about us. A crime needs to be under investigation about an individual or group before the data capture can begin.
- streetwiseherc 13y agoAs a software developer, which companies (if any) can we trust when selecting programming stacks and hosting solutions. I'm currently not doing anything illegal (that I know of), but I don't like the idea of supporting those who conspire with the government (even if they're 'forced to'). I'd feel pretty 'unclean' about supporting anything that came out of or was associated with Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. Who does that leave???
- j2d3 13y agohe's making a list, checking it twice; gonna find out who's naughty and nice...
- saraid216 13y agoPretty sure that's God.
- 205guy 13y agoAm I he only one who read that bit about wire-tapping the Supreme Court judges? While unsurprising, that really seems to cross the line from counter-whatever to political manipulation.
- northwest 13y agoAbsolutely. It's starting to play "God".
- cheald 13y agoSo here's my startup idea: Stenographically-encoded messages in high-def porn. It's secure communications with a built-in subscription model! Porn accounts for a huge chunk of internet traffic today, and video doesn't compress too well. Get enough people exchanging messages in porn videos and all of a sudden, those listening in have a whole hell of a lot more bytes to sift through. (I'm only half joking.)
- throwawaykf02 13y agoReal terrorists have already been using that for a long time. (For instance, remember those media blurbs about lots of porn being found in the raid on bin Laden?) As such I'd bet they have infrastructure in place to detect such communications. But in the same half-joking vein, some other problems: 1. I recall reading that such stegonagraphically watermarked videos were pretty easy to detect using simple statistical analysis of the noise in the frames. With dedicated hardware for multimedia decoding cheaply and ubiquitously available, frames can be efficiently extracted and the additional number of bytes does little to slow them down. If the hidden data is encrypted, well, you could just do that without the porn. 2. Unless you make it as easy as tapping a key to start communicating, it still does not remove a main barrier to widespread adoption of encryption, which is inconvenience. 3. The problem with porn is, people will just end up paying more attention to the medium rather than the message.
- nwh 13y ago> you could just do that without the porn. I think the idea is that it's something people naturally keep hidden, so it doesn't look suspicious to have handed to someone n a USB drive or sent privately. There's not really much suspicious about people hiding porn.
- ippisl 13y agoI read some research about provably secure steganography , which claim that if you know the statistics of the communication channel, you can build secure steno, at least to the level one way functions. So it is interesting if in reality there is a stego detection tool. www.cs.umn.edu/~hopper/tc-stego.pdf Btw one of the authors is Luis von ahn, the founder of duelingo, the language teaching/translation app.
- LekkoscPiwa 13y agoCrazy idea: software that would generate TBs of fake communications (email, skype calls, etc) daily to disrupt NSA operations. Possible? Helpful?
- forgottenpaswrd 13y agoThis is not crazy. This has been done for centuries. You send five messages that are not true and one which is, and have some way to know the truth.
- northwest 13y agoIf you're paying taxes in the US, you would probably hate this concept, b/c: You spend something like 25% of your work life (taxes) to pay for something that works against you (mass surveillance). Then you start trowing stones at it while continuing to work for it.
- LekkoscPiwa 13y agoNah, doesn't make sense. According to this fighting nazism while being German wouldn't have make sense in 1930s because you pay taxes.
- northwest 13y agoWhat I mean is: We also need to start getting rid of the root of the problem, not only try to fight some symptoms (patching holes is OK for the short term).
- LekkoscPiwa 13y agoAgain, similar to Nazi Germany in 1930s. If you have a democratic society where 90% voters are against freedom and vote for all the wars are in favor of all the BS -- there is only this much you can do.
- yen223 13y agoIt turns out the Nigerian prince was a counter-NSA agent!
- northwest 13y ago> He claims the NSA tapped the phone of high-level government officials and the news media 10 years ago. That would explain why Obama seems to have become the best sheep ever: 1. Spy on them 2. Collect everything that's somehow "embarrassing" for them 3. Regularly remind them of what happens if they don't do what would want them to do By that logic, they have probably "vetted" Obama thoroughly, before deciding to not discredit/destroy him completely in front of the public.
- junto 13y agoI truly believe this is what 'democracy' has become, not just, in the US, but the UK as well.
- alan_cx 13y agoIndeed. This is the obvious issue every seems to be skirting over. Even the mass media seems not as out rages as it easily could be. Problem is we can never know to what extent this may or may not happen. What is needed is a high ranking politician to come out, admit to something awful and go on record to being black mailed. See, I cant believe that you get to politician age and have a perfect record. I cant believe that the security services would be interested in politicians back grounds. And now we see the mechanism to get all the information they need to comprehensively check them out. So, I almost cant understand why a security service would not raise such issues with prospective politicians, high ranking business men, media, etc. It would be negligent not to. Well, with out saying opr threatening anything, such people know that the security services have something damaging on them which could be leaked. They don't need to be told, do they? Such people are fairly bright. The implications are obvious. Tow the line, don't dump on the security services. And if asked to support some evil new power, well........ To my mind the blackmail circle and potential to select politicians, and others is too obvious.
- espeed 13y agoReposting this from a previous thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5897654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5897654)... I remember during the Boston bombing investigation, Tim Clemente, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent, told Erin Burnett on CNN that they could go back and get access to the content of the calls between the deceased bomber and his wife, Katherine Russell. After some Googling, I found a partial transcript of the CNN interview... "Almost immediately Erin Burnett, the host of CNN's Outfront, wanted to know how the government knew. Aren't phone calls supposed to be private? She interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent on May 1, asking:" Is there any way … they [the federal investigators] can try to get the phone companies to give that up … It’s not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There’s no way they can actually find out what [was said on the call], right, unless she tells them? Clemente: There is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation … we certainly can find that out. Burnett: So they can actually get that? … that is incredible. Clemente: Welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak, whether we know it or like it, or not. Source: http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15340-boston-bombing-investigation-reveals-government-surveillance-of-phone-calls http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15340-boston... CNN Interview Clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPHZrVPt4-U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPHZrVPt4-U) CNN Follow-Up Interview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt9kRLrmrjc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt9kRLrmrjc) When I initially saw this on CNN, my first thought was, do they also have access to all photos and videos that are taken and transmitted online? And if so, couldn't they stitch together a multi-angle montage from all the photos and videos taken at the scene of the Boston bombing (like http://photosynth.net http://photosynth.net), rather than asking everyone to manually scour through their personal footage?
- northwest 13y agoAnd ultimately: Did they want these events to happen? Fear is the oldest and cheapest manipulation strategy. Religions such as the Catholic Church have successfully used it for thousands of years: "It's going to be hell, if you don't do as we say."
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- blisterpeanuts 13y agoBackups! That's the upside of this whole NSA domestic spying brouhaha. How many times have you wanted to replay a phone conversation, or recover an email from a past account, or throw your boss's memo back in his face when he tries to "scope creep" your project? That's right. Probably every one of us wishes for this capability. And then there's the federal budget deficit, no? I propose to kill two birds with one stone here. NSA can offer to "remember it for you wholesale" as Philip K. Dick put it! Maybe $0.10 per byte (or $0.25/minute for audio) to search and provide on CD virtually anything you have said or done since 1992. It's actually rather comforting to think that, although they're not very good at their primary mission of stopping terrorism, they have this great ancillary benefit that we can all take advantage of!
- redsymbol 13y agoHoly crap: RUSSELL TICE: ...The NSA were targeting individuals. In that case, they were judges like the Supreme Court. I held in my hand Judge Alito's targeting information for his phones and his staff and his family. If true, that's... mind boggling. What possible valid reason could the NSA have to secretly monitor the calls of a US Supreme Court justice? And his staff, AND family? I really hope this allegation is false.
- jboggan 13y agoI hope as well, but I doubt it. That kind of secret power begs to be abused. The system of checks and balances that we learned about in civics class is simply gone. A willful executive with these powers at hand can sway the outcome of any congressional vote, any Supreme Court decision, or any media story. Our immune system against tyranny has been compromised and irrevocably so. We haven't yet descended into despotism but it is inevitable once a strong enough individual rises. To carry the analogy further, it's 1984 and we've just contracted HIV.
- northwest 13y agoIf you are tired of having the same discussions over and over again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152935 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152935
- codex 13y agoShould this turn out to be true, the legal rationale is likely that a warrant is only need to read a communication, not to collect it. So "they" archive everything and then promise to look at it only when legal to do so. The NSA can even record American citizens if they promise not to read the data if it turns out to be an American they've recorded (unless the FBI wants the data, of course). Even if this promise holds, though, people may dislike this policy, to put it mildly. If a robot takes a naked picture of me, it's an invasion of privacy even if no human ever looks at it.