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Comment by sterlind | Hacker News Reader

The NSA plays the "Kevin Bacon" game, where selectors target an individual, their friends, friends of friends (2 degrees of separation out, iirc.)

I suspect they're performing a full-take of the call contents as well, just not through the PINWALE/MARINA ingestion system. It's likely commingled with bulk traffic snarfed up by beam splitters at the telcos' NOCs, and separated on-demand from the TEMPORA buffer.

At this point, I'm jaded enough to domestic mass-surveillance, I just want my money's worth. Russia successfully implanted DarkEnergy on domestic SCADA, nation-wide. Do we have that capability abroad? Prioritize foreign retailiatory offense, please!

(hi @NSA if this shows up in XKS!)

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> I suspect they're performing a full-take of the call contents as well, just not through the PINWALE/MARINA ingestion system.

What is the basis for this suspicion? If it were true, that's what people would have reported on from Snowden's millions of leaked documents instead of simply metadata (call data records).

"In the telcos, singlemode fiber is used to connect long distance switches, central offices and SLCs (subscriber loop carriers, small switches in pedestals in subdivisions or office parks or in the basement of a larger building). Practically every telco's network is now fiber optics except the connection to the home." [1]

Specifically, AT&T has transitioned its PSTN backbone fully to SIP, which is a form of VoIP: "AT&T will exchange SIP traffic at the access border controller layer (i.e. SBCs, more specifically Acme Packet SBCs) via IP handoff at a few "strategic locations," directly peering with a select number of Tier 1 carriers. AT&T will also provide transit and direct termination through its network and support all roaming traffic to interwork with other wireless carriers" [2]

So both voice and data are going over the same fiber lines, since it's all IP (which reduces costs considerably.) We know that Room 641A was one of many QUANTUM locations, where traffic was beam-split. [3]

It seems from [4], that we have confirmation that TURMOIL and INCENSER snarf up PSTN as well as IP. Since all of that was working well before 2010, and we know TEMPORA acts as a buffer for high-volume stuff (fed by the Narus machines), and voice is IP now because of SIP, I feel reasonably confident it's getting stored at some duration at the exchanges.

1. https://www.lanshack.com/fiber-optic-tutorial-network.aspx

2. http://sip-trunking.tmcnet.com/topics/enterprise-voip/articl...

3. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

4. https://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2014/11/incenser-or-how-n...

According to Snowden's documents, the NSA isn't collecting all data out of Room 641A, just data sent to or from specific foreign targets with surveillance court orders, contradicting your claim.

Could you provide a source for your claim? You can read about TEMPORA here [1], which contradicts you:

"We keep the full sessions for 3 working days and the metadata for 30."

The filtering you're talking about would happen in POKERFACE, which applies after intake into TEMPORA. Basically:

Backhaul -> TEMPORA (3 day buffer) -> POKERFACE (scrubs data by policy such as US citizen status) -> XKeyscore

1. http://www.spiegel.de/media/media-34103.pdf

TEMPORA is a GCHQ system, not an NSA system, and has nothing to do with Room 641A. Additionally, it cannot record all US phone conversations as you claimed because domestic phone calls do not leave the US.

Fair point, though we did get GCHQ's data.

Room 641A was part of the WINDSTOP programs run by SSO, comprised of MUSCULAR, INCENSER and DS-300. According to [1], the NSA mass-collects VoIP partly through XKEYSCORE, FALLOUT and TURMOIL (harvested from INCENSER/DS-300/others), and PSTN through LOPERS (though it's unclear if LOPERS ingests domestic (INCENSER) data or just Europe<->Asia (DANCINGOASIS) data.)

Incidentally, it's pretty impressive how much scale they handle. The DANCINGOASIS cable transfers 25Pb per day, while 3-6Pb were analyzed. And that's on a totally black op (no corporate knowledge) tap! Seriously cool.

1. https://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2014/05/nsas-largest-cabl...

> Fair point, though we did get GCHQ's data.

No, the US gets some of GCHQ's intelligence reports, not all of GCHQ'S data.

> According to [1], the NSA mass-collects VoIP partly through XKEYSCORE, FALLOUT and TURMOIL (harvested from INCENSER/DS-300/others), and PSTN through LOPERS (though it's unclear if LOPERS ingests domestic (INCENSER) data or just Europe<->Asia (DANCINGOASIS) data.)

Do you even read your own sources? INCENSER (https://electrospaces.blogspot.com/2014/11/incenser-or-how-n...) designates a cable that links Europe and Asia. None of the collection points you listed are domestic, and none of them collect comtents, only metadata. In Snowden's documents, the only contents that were collected were in regions hostile to the United States.

Read https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Minimization%20Procedure... for an executive summary of NSA data collection, which all of Snowden's documents agree with, once you understand what they say.

Here's a decent review. The sad that as time passes, the more normal this will seem to everybody.

https://www.propublica.org/article/nsa-data-collection-faq

This is both old (they no longer get all metadata, just the 500 million requested as described in today's article) and contradicts GGP's claim.

I guess we'll just have to wait for another whistleblower to confirm they are lying about it again. At least it isn't "wittingly."

Except they never lied about that according to Snowden's documents. They never recorded all domestic phone calls.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4521220/james-clapper-witting...

1. James Clapper is not in the NSA.

2. The NSA never recorded all domestic phone calls, and there is no evidence that they ever did, so neither Clapper nor the NSA lied about that.

I've been citing a lot of sources here. Can you clearly cite your assertion?

Over the past few weeks and several threads, you've consistently asserted that NSA/CIA don't bulk-collect Americans' data, with no citing proof. Did you fill out an SF-86 or something?

None of your sources support your claims. I've been pointing to the exact same sources.

I do not work for the US government any more than you work for the Kremlin. Obama called for a "thoughtful fact based debate" over government data collection policies in the wake of the Snowden leaks. By spreading nonsense, you are preventing that debate from occurring.

I guess that means no citations.

How about TFA for a citation? If you had read it, you would have known that the article you linked is no longer relevant.

How about the article you linked for a citation? If you had read the article you posted, you would have known that it doesn't support your full-take of content claim.

Exactly the same as with GGP, my citations are the articles that you and he posted.

> 1. James Clapper is not in the NSA.

It's true that James Clapper was not employed by the NSA at the time the question was asked. Are you suggesting that therefore he does not know the answer? If he does not know the answer then why did he answer the question?

> 2. The NSA never recorded all domestic phone calls, and there is no evidence that they ever did, so neither Clapper nor the NSA lied about that.

The question posed in the linked video clip is "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans?".

> Are you suggesting that therefore he does not know the answer?

No, I'm asserting that any statements by Clapper can't show the NSA lying about anything any more than statements by Trump can show the NSA lying about anything because neither is part of the NSA.

> The question posed in the linked video clip is "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans?".

And the video is irrelevant to the discussion both due to the point above and due to the discussion being about recording content of conversations, as I said in GGP.

Clapper was Director of National Intelligence, head of all American intelligence agencies. He may not have been in the NSA, but he definitely had the responsibility of oversight.

So does Trump, who lies more often and more egregiously. That doesn't change the fact that the NSA did not lie about its data collection practices.

Another good point: the NSA is allowed to keep encrypted data indefinitely, warrantlessly. Decryptions don't count as data - they're analysis of legally-stored encrypted info.

The A5/1 cipher has been totally pwned, without even needing a crib, but it's still used for voice traffic. The NSA is allowed to store and decrypt all of this, AFAICT, through this loophole.

IIRC it's 3 Kevin Bacons (degree of seperation), so almost everybody.

See the research on Six Degrees...

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