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I'm interested in the technology they use for this -- record on-site, requiring someone in the country maintain a pretty decent hard disk farm, or send every ca

by rdl 12y ago

I'm interested in the technology they use for this -- record on-site, requiring someone in the country maintain a pretty decent hard disk farm, or send every call back to the US over expensive bandwidth? For the Bahamas, you could clearly do either, but for the Philippines, sending back all content would be seriously difficult. Which is why it looks like they just do metadata from the bigger countries. For the unnamed full-data country, I'd probably bet on the Caymans. Antigua or another small Caribbean nation would be a possibility. I assume there is another entire program for actual jihadi communications (Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc.) under different cover and pretense; the other countries in MYSTIC appear to be DEA LI based.

sitkack 12y ago
The population of the Bahamas is only ~400k. Lets say everyone talked to each other for 2 hrs a day, 200K * 2hrs. And their conversations are recorded using Opus [0] @ 32 kbits / s (we don't want analysts ears getting tired from compression artifacts) 32kbits is 4KB/s ~ .24 MB/minute ... turns out to be on the order of 6TB a day on the high end. This 9U server can hold all of the Bahamas voice traffic for 30 days. http://www.storagenewsletter.com/rubriques/systems-raid-nas-san/eracks-9u-nas50/ http://www.storagenewsletter.com/rubriques/systems-raid-nas-... The calls never have to leave the island and they probably have a nice spotify/splunk style web page for playing back conversations. [0] http://www.opus-codec.org/examples/ http://www.opus-codec.org/examples/
- toomuchtodo 12y ago
  Supposedly Backblaze was at one point approached about their 45 drive chassis' by a federal agency. http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/03/19/backblaze-storage-pod-4/ http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/03/19/backblaze-storage-pod-4... 45 drives * 6TB drives = 270TB of storage in one chassis (more than a month's worth of recordings). How much does it cost to get a whole rack colo'd in the Bahamas? As you mentioned, if you have the horsepower, you can do speech to text right on the box. Plenty of space for ElasticSearch as well.
samstave 12y ago
Using the USS Jimmy Carter, you'd have to believe there is a web of undersea cables they have laid to backhaul from where-ever they'd like. To think that the NSA is wholly reliant on already laid carrier cable is naive. It would be interesting to speculate on the method by which they lay their cables to protect them from detection.... meaning, do they now have means to bury the cables as opposed to surface-lay.
- carrotleads 12y ago
  if read some of the commentary on the web, you will have to assume most people are naive. I think you are right that NSA has their own cables laid, unlikely to get sabotaged too.
  - JetSpiegel 12y ago
    If they get strapped for cash (like that's gonna happen), they could rent them to Tier 1 ISP.
    - samstave 12y ago
      Tier 0!

by rdl 12y ago

sitkack 12y ago

The population of the Bahamas is only ~400k. Lets say everyone talked to each other for 2 hrs a day, 200K * 2hrs. And their conversations are recorded using Opus [0] @ 32 kbits / s (we don't want analysts ears getting tired from compression artifacts) 32kbits is 4KB/s ~ .24 MB/minute ... turns out to be on the order of 6TB a day on the high end. This 9U server can hold all of the Bahamas voice traffic for 30 days. http://www.storagenewsletter.com/rubriques/systems-raid-nas-san/eracks-9u-nas50/ http://www.storagenewsletter.com/rubriques/systems-raid-nas-... The calls never have to leave the island and they probably have a nice spotify/splunk style web page for playing back conversations. [0] http://www.opus-codec.org/examples/ http://www.opus-codec.org/examples/

toomuchtodo 12y ago
Supposedly Backblaze was at one point approached about their 45 drive chassis' by a federal agency. http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/03/19/backblaze-storage-pod-4/ http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/03/19/backblaze-storage-pod-4... 45 drives * 6TB drives = 270TB of storage in one chassis (more than a month's worth of recordings). How much does it cost to get a whole rack colo'd in the Bahamas? As you mentioned, if you have the horsepower, you can do speech to text right on the box. Plenty of space for ElasticSearch as well.

samstave 12y ago

Using the USS Jimmy Carter, you'd have to believe there is a web of undersea cables they have laid to backhaul from where-ever they'd like. To think that the NSA is wholly reliant on already laid carrier cable is naive. It would be interesting to speculate on the method by which they lay their cables to protect them from detection.... meaning, do they now have means to bury the cables as opposed to surface-lay.

carrotleads 12y ago
if read some of the commentary on the web, you will have to assume most people are naive. I think you are right that NSA has their own cables laid, unlikely to get sabotaged too.
- JetSpiegel 12y ago
  If they get strapped for cash (like that's gonna happen), they could rent them to Tier 1 ISP.
  - samstave 12y ago
    Tier 0!