9 ms·

NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

175 points by weu 13y ago

rootuid 13y ago
"At the request of U.S. officials, The Washington Post is withholding details that could be used to identify the country where the system is being employed or other countries where its use was envisioned" Therefore there is no point to the article.
- JetSpiegel 13y ago
  The status quo is then restored. All this article is is chest-pounding by the US to warn potential competitors in the global sphere of influence.
  - ihsw 13y ago
    Or it could serve as a signal that the US is the best country to align with, since they know everything. This whole NSA debacle could serve as an impressive advertisement for the strength and stability of the industrial spying complex, justifying great investment and pushing important business objectives.
    - eternalban 13y ago
      s/could/does
  - res0nat0r 13y ago
    What is wrong with that? The program described in the article is legal.
    - joshfraser 13y ago
      If it's legal, then we need to change the laws.
    - peterkelly 13y ago
      Slavery was legal once too.
- cklaus 13y ago
  Raise your hand if you think its US domestic soil, if not now, how about in the future...
- paulannesley 13y ago
  > Therefore there is no point to the article. I disagree. What difference does it make _which_ foreign country the article refers to? The fact that 100% of calls made by all people in a country are being recorded by another country is enough.
  - haakon 13y ago
    It's enough to make it interesting, but there could be a much more interesting diplomatic scandal depending on which country is targeted. Imagine if it's not Yemen or Iran, but Canada or Switzerland?
- shill 13y ago
  Pretend that it is Pakistan.
D9u 13y ago
Sadly, it seems that the majority have become inured to the offensive over reach of agencies such as NSA, GCHQ, etc. The only way to play it as if the country where the system is being employed is your own. Yes, I said it... I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the aforementioned country is the USA.
noblethrasher 13y ago
I posted this spreadsheet in another thread to give an idea of the cost of storing all of the nation's calls. I figured an annual cost of about $11 million. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqWtA_3af-R0dE5hVGdZNUxkZlBYck83TkQ2NlJxQVE&usp=sharing#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqWtA_3af-R0dE5... (the spreadsheet allows editing, so you all can play with the numbers).
- cklaus 13y ago
  What does it cost to transcribe All VOICE calls ->TEXT for faster analysis, apply DEEP learning to it, and apply a graph of Everyone bigger than Facebook to these patterns?
  - noblethrasher 13y ago
    I was just talking about the cost of storage, not acquisition or analysis.
  - abecedarius 13y ago
    Just going by energy need I back-of-the-envelope estimated the Bluffdale center could run voice recognition on all U.S. voice calls, yes. I'd guess it's not the best use of that much power, currently, but it'll only get easier.
  - PeterisP 13y ago
    The voice->text is inaccurate enough (especially because the many different languages that can be used) so you have to keep the original recording and not just the text; but yes, you can easily do things like "find all conversations where the word 'nakamoto' is heard" with mass scale voice/speech analysis.
- intslack 13y ago
  Brewster Kahle of archive.org ran the numbers last year as well: https://blog.archive.org/2013/06/15/cost-to-store-all-us-phonecalls-made-in-a-year-in-cloud-storage-so-it-could-be-datamined/ https://blog.archive.org/2013/06/15/cost-to-store-all-us-pho... https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuqlWHQKlooOdGJrSzhBVnh0WGlzWHpCZFNVcURkX0E https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuqlWHQKlooOdGJ...
mladenkovacevic 13y ago
I wonder if it's not Afghanistan, Iran or any of the usual suapecta but actually Canada. We've got a puppet federal government submissive to US demands.. A small number of large NSA friendly telcos that reach a large majority of the population, and a large number of immigrants from all over the world. Perfect testing ground for such a system.
- cracell 13y ago
  Why not all 3 and throw in the US as well? The goal is too record everything which means implementing programs like this in as many countries as they can. Actually identifying which countries such programs are currently operating in would be tricky without a leak. It's a real shame this article didn't publish it.
  - poulson 13y ago
    This makes me wonder how Greenwald, Gellman, and Poitras come to a consensus on what to hold back. Clearly they all have access to the data and it would be possible (read: very likely) for them to disagree on what should and should not be withheld.
rdtsc 13y ago
Read foreign country as US here too. Basically they can record everything and a constitutionally defined "search" doesn't occur unless a human search and looks at the information. Binney and other were talking about this even long before Snowden. So what happens now, everything you do gets recorded, stored in their data center and kept for decades. As soon as you do anything they deem suspicious they might find you downloaded strange foot fetish porn when you were in college and try to blackmail you.
- samstave 13y ago
  Echelon and Carnivore. We have been talking about this since the 80s....
  - effdee 13y ago
    There have also been rumors about Amdocs [1] being kind of the Israeli counterpart. They do billing for telcos (i.e. determine who talked to whom for how long). The list of their customers is quite impressive. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdocs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdocs
    - contingencies 13y ago
      These 'rumours' are more like an open secret inside the industry. Personally I have seen billing APIs at AT&T (US) and T-Mobile (US) which are semi-equivalent. For one of those, calls go straight to an Amdocs domain on an AS hosted outside of the carrier. Of course, few people will see these now since Google Play canned external billing APIs (removing most of the interest here) and most new projects choose to access carrier billing via international aggregators (since integrating with one carrier can take months of pain, if you even have enough of a case to bother, and if they even talk to you). For NFC stuff, most US carriers are combining forces to produce a new API which will effectively similarly distance any integrators. The reason I got a look was we were developing the flagship app for Samsung Galaxy series device launch in the US, and the carriers were all on board with it. An older, long term IT veteran friend of mine who recently retired in Australia and chaired the mobile phone number portability multi-carrier technical implementation roundtable told me he was essentially fired (contract not renewed) for opening up an inquiry in to the wasteful billing practices at one particular Australian carrier. It turned out they were using Amdocs. He described making a decision, being forced to sit through a presentation, making the same decision, being forced to sit through another presentation, until the end of this contract period. This and other sources concur: the Amdocs billing stuff's like cancer. Once they're in your network, you can't get rid of them. If I were a national privacy authority or the European Data Protection Supervisor, I'd walk in to all my carriers, seize all third party billing systems, dump out disk images, and analyze them top to bottom in a nationally transparent, multi-party audit citing national security / privacy.
spikels 13y ago
"Nobody is listening to your telephone calls," Mr. Obama said. "That's not what this program is about." It's about recording your calls to listen to later.
- schoen 13y ago
  In this context, the troubles with that statement are "your" and "this program". https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130729/12223823986/senators-not-impressed-with-james-clappers-carefully-worded-responses.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130729/12223823986/senat...
qwerta 13y ago
It says NSA only keeps 1 month of voice records. I think they store everything for couple of years, perhaps indefinitely. Storing all that voice is very cheap and is too juicy to let go. Also there were rumors about this recording for the past 30 years. GSM voice codec has rate 13 kbit/s. 6 billion people x 1 hour of talking per day = 6e9 x 3600 x 13/8 = 35 TB/day.
- Crito 13y ago
  Even if they only store the most of it for a month, I will eat my shorts if they do not use ML or plain old "intelligence" to select much of it for indefinite storage.
- Spooky23 13y ago
  As with most newspaper articles that have government officials providing material input, what isn't said is usually more important that what is. (That's true in any context, not just NSA -- read stories about your local Mayor and road projects with a critical eye too) The article states nothing at all about retention.
- dictum 13y ago
  I doubt they only store it for a month. Besides how cheap (in national security budget terms) it is to store everything indefinitely, the timespan of a month is just not enough time to gather enough intelligence, especially when you don't know what you're looking for. If you're already capturing everything, you want a big picture, and a big picture isn't something you get with just what's been happening for the past month. If they ever delete stuff, it's based on tiers with different priorities (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7394346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7394346), not an arbitrary period.
- contingencies 13y ago
  GSM voice codec has rate 13 kbit/s. Wasn't there a story very recently about new voice compression bringing voice storage down by 30%? I'm not even sure GSM was the go-to beforehand. So I'd say, halve that estimate and you're ballpark current. 6 billion people x 1 hour of talking per day = 6e9 x 3600 x 13/8 = 35 TB/day I'd say most places more like 15 minutes per person as a maximum average, generally even less. That means 4.3TB/day. Which is only a couple of $200 hard disks, or four if you want RAID1.

175 points by weu 13y ago

"At the request of U.S. officials, The Washington Post is withholding details that could be used to identify the country where the system is being employed or other countries where its use was envisioned" Therefore there is no point to the article.

JetSpiegel 13y ago
The status quo is then restored. All this article is is chest-pounding by the US to warn potential competitors in the global sphere of influence.
- ihsw 13y ago
  Or it could serve as a signal that the US is the best country to align with, since they know everything. This whole NSA debacle could serve as an impressive advertisement for the strength and stability of the industrial spying complex, justifying great investment and pushing important business objectives.
  - eternalban 13y ago
    s/could/does
- res0nat0r 13y ago
  What is wrong with that? The program described in the article is legal.
  - joshfraser 13y ago
    If it's legal, then we need to change the laws.
  - peterkelly 13y ago
    Slavery was legal once too.
cklaus 13y ago
Raise your hand if you think its US domestic soil, if not now, how about in the future...
paulannesley 13y ago
> Therefore there is no point to the article. I disagree. What difference does it make _which_ foreign country the article refers to? The fact that 100% of calls made by all people in a country are being recorded by another country is enough.
- haakon 13y ago
  It's enough to make it interesting, but there could be a much more interesting diplomatic scandal depending on which country is targeted. Imagine if it's not Yemen or Iran, but Canada or Switzerland?
shill 13y ago
Pretend that it is Pakistan.

D9u 13y ago

Sadly, it seems that the majority have become inured to the offensive over reach of agencies such as NSA, GCHQ, etc. The only way to play it as if the country where the system is being employed is your own. Yes, I said it... I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the aforementioned country is the USA.

noblethrasher 13y ago

I posted this spreadsheet in another thread to give an idea of the cost of storing all of the nation's calls. I figured an annual cost of about $11 million. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqWtA_3af-R0dE5hVGdZNUxkZlBYck83TkQ2NlJxQVE&usp=sharing#gid=0 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqWtA_3af-R0dE5... (the spreadsheet allows editing, so you all can play with the numbers).

cklaus 13y ago
What does it cost to transcribe All VOICE calls ->TEXT for faster analysis, apply DEEP learning to it, and apply a graph of Everyone bigger than Facebook to these patterns?
- noblethrasher 13y ago
  I was just talking about the cost of storage, not acquisition or analysis.
- abecedarius 13y ago
  Just going by energy need I back-of-the-envelope estimated the Bluffdale center could run voice recognition on all U.S. voice calls, yes. I'd guess it's not the best use of that much power, currently, but it'll only get easier.
- PeterisP 13y ago
  The voice->text is inaccurate enough (especially because the many different languages that can be used) so you have to keep the original recording and not just the text; but yes, you can easily do things like "find all conversations where the word 'nakamoto' is heard" with mass scale voice/speech analysis.
intslack 13y ago
Brewster Kahle of archive.org ran the numbers last year as well: https://blog.archive.org/2013/06/15/cost-to-store-all-us-phonecalls-made-in-a-year-in-cloud-storage-so-it-could-be-datamined/ https://blog.archive.org/2013/06/15/cost-to-store-all-us-pho... https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuqlWHQKlooOdGJrSzhBVnh0WGlzWHpCZFNVcURkX0E https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuqlWHQKlooOdGJ...

mladenkovacevic 13y ago

I wonder if it's not Afghanistan, Iran or any of the usual suapecta but actually Canada. We've got a puppet federal government submissive to US demands.. A small number of large NSA friendly telcos that reach a large majority of the population, and a large number of immigrants from all over the world. Perfect testing ground for such a system.

cracell 13y ago
Why not all 3 and throw in the US as well? The goal is too record everything which means implementing programs like this in as many countries as they can. Actually identifying which countries such programs are currently operating in would be tricky without a leak. It's a real shame this article didn't publish it.
- poulson 13y ago
  This makes me wonder how Greenwald, Gellman, and Poitras come to a consensus on what to hold back. Clearly they all have access to the data and it would be possible (read: very likely) for them to disagree on what should and should not be withheld.

rdtsc 13y ago

Read foreign country as US here too. Basically they can record everything and a constitutionally defined "search" doesn't occur unless a human search and looks at the information. Binney and other were talking about this even long before Snowden. So what happens now, everything you do gets recorded, stored in their data center and kept for decades. As soon as you do anything they deem suspicious they might find you downloaded strange foot fetish porn when you were in college and try to blackmail you.

samstave 13y ago
Echelon and Carnivore. We have been talking about this since the 80s....
- effdee 13y ago
  There have also been rumors about Amdocs [1] being kind of the Israeli counterpart. They do billing for telcos (i.e. determine who talked to whom for how long). The list of their customers is quite impressive. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdocs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdocs
  - contingencies 13y ago
    These 'rumours' are more like an open secret inside the industry. Personally I have seen billing APIs at AT&T (US) and T-Mobile (US) which are semi-equivalent. For one of those, calls go straight to an Amdocs domain on an AS hosted outside of the carrier. Of course, few people will see these now since Google Play canned external billing APIs (removing most of the interest here) and most new projects choose to access carrier billing via international aggregators (since integrating with one carrier can take months of pain, if you even have enough of a case to bother, and if they even talk to you). For NFC stuff, most US carriers are combining forces to produce a new API which will effectively similarly distance any integrators. The reason I got a look was we were developing the flagship app for Samsung Galaxy series device launch in the US, and the carriers were all on board with it. An older, long term IT veteran friend of mine who recently retired in Australia and chaired the mobile phone number portability multi-carrier technical implementation roundtable told me he was essentially fired (contract not renewed) for opening up an inquiry in to the wasteful billing practices at one particular Australian carrier. It turned out they were using Amdocs. He described making a decision, being forced to sit through a presentation, making the same decision, being forced to sit through another presentation, until the end of this contract period. This and other sources concur: the Amdocs billing stuff's like cancer. Once they're in your network, you can't get rid of them. If I were a national privacy authority or the European Data Protection Supervisor, I'd walk in to all my carriers, seize all third party billing systems, dump out disk images, and analyze them top to bottom in a nationally transparent, multi-party audit citing national security / privacy.

spikels 13y ago

"Nobody is listening to your telephone calls," Mr. Obama said. "That's not what this program is about." It's about recording your calls to listen to later.

schoen 13y ago
In this context, the troubles with that statement are "your" and "this program". https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130729/12223823986/senators-not-impressed-with-james-clappers-carefully-worded-responses.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130729/12223823986/senat...

qwerta 13y ago

It says NSA only keeps 1 month of voice records. I think they store everything for couple of years, perhaps indefinitely. Storing all that voice is very cheap and is too juicy to let go. Also there were rumors about this recording for the past 30 years. GSM voice codec has rate 13 kbit/s. 6 billion people x 1 hour of talking per day = 6e9 x 3600 x 13/8 = 35 TB/day.

Crito 13y ago
Even if they only store the most of it for a month, I will eat my shorts if they do not use ML or plain old "intelligence" to select much of it for indefinite storage.
Spooky23 13y ago
As with most newspaper articles that have government officials providing material input, what isn't said is usually more important that what is. (That's true in any context, not just NSA -- read stories about your local Mayor and road projects with a critical eye too) The article states nothing at all about retention.
dictum 13y ago
I doubt they only store it for a month. Besides how cheap (in national security budget terms) it is to store everything indefinitely, the timespan of a month is just not enough time to gather enough intelligence, especially when you don't know what you're looking for. If you're already capturing everything, you want a big picture, and a big picture isn't something you get with just what's been happening for the past month. If they ever delete stuff, it's based on tiers with different priorities (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7394346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7394346), not an arbitrary period.
contingencies 13y ago
GSM voice codec has rate 13 kbit/s. Wasn't there a story very recently about new voice compression bringing voice storage down by 30%? I'm not even sure GSM was the go-to beforehand. So I'd say, halve that estimate and you're ballpark current. 6 billion people x 1 hour of talking per day = 6e9 x 3600 x 13/8 = 35 TB/day I'd say most places more like 15 minutes per person as a maximum average, generally even less. That means 4.3TB/day. Which is only a couple of $200 hard disks, or four if you want RAID1.