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Comment by jlgaddis | Hacker News Reader

500M in all of 2017? Oh, come on!

We found out that Verizon -- just Verizon -- was handing over "phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily" in June 2013.

500M might be an official number that they're willing to release but (without any way to prove it, obviously) I'm certain that the REAL number is much, much higher.

For an organization who has vowed to "collect it all", it just doesn't seem likely that the NSA voluntarily went from "an estimated billions of records collected per day" to just 500M per year.

Or perhaps it's just 500M according to their own made up definition of "collect"?

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>Or perhaps it's just 500M according to their own made up definition of "collect"?

This sounds like it's much closer to the truth. "It's not a collection until it comes up as a result in a search" would be about on par with the nonsense the NSA was claiming about what was considered searching data on American Citizens.

So we just need an analyst to search for “lol” or “:-)” and the number goes to 50 billion.

The NSA only counts data as collected once it was accessed by a human in a query... but they do have all the data.

Indeed. That was Clapper's cover for his perjury in front of Congress: "collected" records are labeled as such only after they are "returned as part of queries" -- which is not what people usually think "collected" means. Any normal person would consider all records potentially subject to queries have already been "collected" for that end, and should be counted as such.

If I started "collecting" stolen credit card numbers as a hobby, but not using them, did I collect any numbers? What if I only put them in a database and never run a select? I doubt that defense would hold up. I hate word games.

Welcome to newspeak.

From the article:

> The 2017 call records tally remained far less than an estimated billions of records collected per day under the NSA’s old bulk surveillance system, which was exposed by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden in 2013.

Oh I read it. I just don't believe it.

After learning of their liberal use of the English language and how they have "re-defined" common words to suit their agenda, I believe very little of anything they say.

They've redefined nothing. See section 2 of https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Minimization%20Procedure.... All the definitions seem reasonable.

The definitions you're thinking of came from conspiracy theory blogs in the aftermath of the Snowden leaks, which proliferated because the numbers didn't add up when taken together with Greenwald's mistaken assertion that PRISM is a full-take program.

They could easily make it be an honest statement by simply having a different three-letter organization collecting the rest.

is that the organization that we don't know exist yet? a 2 letter name might work better... DB

Not sure if you're trying to reference something with suggestion of DB ?

Maybe it's 500M uniques?

500 Million quries.

500M calls. The number of unique phones is less.

The real question is what fraction of these calls had both parties inside the US. That's a different category than when one party is external/foreign — that's domestic espionage, which is a violation of law unless pre-authorized by the FISA court. THAT's the number I'd most like to know.

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