No Upper Bound On Phone Record Collection, Says NSA 238
PCWorld reports that "[A] U.S. surveillance court has given the National Security Agency no limit on the number of U.S. telephone records it collects in the name of fighting terrorism, the NSA director said Thursday. The NSA intends to collect all U.S. telephone records and put them in a searchable 'lock box' in the interest of national security, General Keith Alexander, the NSA's director, told U.S. senators."
But don't worry; it's just metadata, until it isn't. (Your row in the NSA database may already be getting cozy in its nice new home in Utah.)
Intends to? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, they don't intend to do this at all, they already do collect all of it.
Metadata Equals Surveillance (Score:5, Insightful)
But don't worry; it's just metadata
Metadata Equals Surveillance [schneier.com]
Tinfoil hats for all (Score:5, Insightful)
Turns out the tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorists were pretty much spot on.
Uhh, yeah right. We'll believe the NSA blindly (Score:3, Insightful)
Think about it. The director of the NSA says "run a query on X number" and show me everything we know. The staff runs the metadata query and shows the list. You know the next command from the director will be, "play those calls."
Anyone dumb enough to believe the NSA isn't recording the entire call is either A) a moron, B) living under a boulder 5 miles in a cave or C) most trusting person in this galaxy.
get over it (Score:0, Insightful)
If storing all communications is physically possible, then it's going to be done. And if not by NSA, then somebody else. Get used to it. Does anyone seriously doubt that many other European countries aren't doing the exact same thing? I feel I need to qualify European, because that's the point. This is shocking for a "developed" country to do, but my point, is it really that shocking?
So... what next? I'm not saying it's right, or should ever be institutionalized policy to spy on all communications, but it's what will happen 9/10 times, whether it's policy or not, in any but the purest government. (for the sake of argument, pretend for a moment that the term "purest government" isn't an oxymornon.)
Eh (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't worry they can only fit a few hundred terabytes in the little box they drew on the blueprint marked "Datacenter" that they let everyone see to prove they weren't storing a whole lot of data there. Don't mind the dozens of all black blueprint pages marked sub-basement [redacted] through sub-basement [redacted] I'm sure none of their data center capacity would ever be classified. They've been nothing but fully transparent these last few years, after all!
Re:New word for Webster's (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is gonna be awesome! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a pretty idea. But even more frightening is what history tells us about the end-result of governments that believe in their own unlimited powers.
National Paranoia, not National Security (Score:4, Insightful)
Very few of American's are terrorists. Any claim otherwise is paranoia. That is not national security. It is national paranoia.
Also, it is illegal. These people are the military. The military should have no oversight of the civilian public.
The NSA is part of the DoD under the Pentagon. That makes them a military entity even if most of those working there are civilians. We have lots of civilians working in all areas of the military. They all are bound by military law and military code of conduct.
These unconstitutional actions need to end.
Re:get over it (Score:5, Insightful)
Get used to it.
No, and that sounds like a terrible idea.
Weren't we warned? (Score:4, Insightful)
"He who sacrifices freedom for security..." – B.J.F.
"The tree of liberty must..." – T.J.
"In the councils of government, we must..." – D.D.E.
On a more positive note, at least the gears of legislation seem to be responding.
Show of hands (Score:5, Insightful)
Who wants this crap to continue "in the name of fighting terrorism"? The alternative seems to be we lose 3000 people every dozen years or so. Big deal. I say we write off our losses every once in a while and stop shitting ourselves.
Re:Bill to rein in NSA (Score:3, Insightful)
And to add, the Senate was 48 D to 51 R which is not a "super majority" by any measure let alone a Democratoc super majority when both Houses were under Republican control. Nice attempt at revisionist history, though.
Re:This is gonna be awesome! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. There's no precedent for that.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Metadata Equals Surveillance (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps some enterprising jounalist, or the EFF could make some FOIA requests for phone records from the NSA, Whitehouse, etc.. Let the government say that the data is private!
They said their data is private.
Not anyone else's.
They'll put you or I in prison or kill us for obtaining their data.
Strat
Re:Foil hats? (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're worried about both, then you need to go double layer with a shiny side facing both in and out.
But should you put the shiny sides against each other or have one shiny side against your head and the other facing out?
Not entirely true (Score:5, Insightful)
First let me say: I work for a phone company. I'm a DBA, I've had my hands on just about everything, so I know what's possible and what's not. Also, no, I do not know of any access the NSA has to our records. Clearly they could have API access but I'm pretty sure I'd have heard about it. If they are in our systems it's likely without our knowledge.
Second: I hate the NSA and everything they are doing. I do not doubt they are already collecting everything they possibly can.
But...
We don't collect "All phone records" All this meta-data everyone is talking about is useless to us. Why would we keep a record of you calling your brother? If it's a toll free call we could give a fuck less and it's NOT recorded. You have to remember that the majority of phone switches in the US today were built in the 60's and 70's. The largest drives they have are incredibly old 20mb hard drives the size of a phone book. (ironic huh?) To allow us to store more data, these drives are dumped via netowork every night to standard Oracle databases. If the NSA is hacking us, this is likely where they get their info. As all the daily data rolls off we can collect more. But the truth of it is, we only collect data for billing purposes. So if your call doesn't generate a charge it doesn't get logged. The switch does not have the disk space to store it. We CAN log all your calls, if requested. CALEA requests come in for that sort of thing, but the number of lines that can be going on in one switch at a time is very limited. The data stacks up fast and we have engineers checking regularly to make sure there aren't too many running at once. I think the most I ever saw, in a city of 50k+ was 3...
Then you have the toll calls. Now your phone company logs those but where the call actually goes? No... They know you dialed X number, were on the phone for Xmin and they charge you. Where the call actually went they have no idea. If you have a number in Istanbul that automatically forwards to some other number? Your phone company has no clue. Your phone company looks up the number from a public list, figures out which exchange it belongs to, then passes the call along the cheapest route to that destination. Each subsequent exchange only knows where the call is headed and the preceding exchange. They do not know who made the call, they may get caller id info but that stuff is ridiculously easy to fake. Your call jumps from exchange A to B to C to D to E... all exchange C knows is that the call is headed to E and it came from B... so they can bill B... B bills A and so on. The only exchange the NSA could get any real data from is A, the one the call originated from.
Long story short, this data is pretty much useless for terrorists. If you're making ANY attempt to disguise where you're calling they're pretty much out of luck. Disposable cellphones from wallmart pretty much make this entire effort pointless.
Now the real question is: What is the NSA really using this data for?
Re:Foil hats? (Score:5, Insightful)
How the fuck is this funny? We have a direct quote from the director of the NSA and you make a joke alluding to conspiracy theorists like they're the crazy ones. The thing that is crazy here is that the dumb useless clueless fucktarded people like you would rather make light of something and continue to act like something is nothing than actually effect some positive change..
The US Constitution is the supreme law of the land.. You would probably make fun of that too.