Hacker News Reader

Comment by avodonosov | Hacker News Reader

Terabytes of tapped phone call records, according to the twitter. If assume mp3, that's of order of millions of minutes.

The whole republic population is 10 million. There is a suspicion all phone calls are recorded. Did the hackers got access to phone call records of every citizen?

Update: commenters below point out that phone codecs have much lower bandwidth than mp3. So it becomes even more likely the hackers have phone records of every resident.

View on HN

I don't recall the source rght now, but I once saw it calculated that recording every phone call in the US would cost the NSA about 20M$/yr in terms of datacenter storage. This means any government not absolutely destitute is able to afford to record all domestic phone calls.

Doing a little dimensional analysis:

MP3 is about 1MB/minute

Assume 5 minutes per person per day on average

AWS Glacier costs 0.4 cents per GB per month

So I get a yearly cost of:

    (365 days) * 
    (5 minutes / day / person) *
    (1MB / minute) *
    (0.001 GB / MB) *
    ($0.004 / GB / month) *
    (12 months / year)
    
    ==
    
    $0.088/person/year

Which is pretty much $20M/year for the US adult population.

How about web traffic?

Vast majority of web traffic is netflix and video streaming, if scoped properly to text messaging only, would be trivial amount of data per person.

The NSA is said to have 5 zettabytes at their data center in Utah[1]. It’s been rumored they could take a snapshot (I’ve heard 30 days) of the internet and process it there. Not sure if they meant the US internet or everything they consumed combined. All rumors except my one link.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2013/09/23/22...

This of course doesn't include the cost of intercepting at all relevant points, or the ability to ingest it in real time, or the ability to do any reads on the data (which Glacier doesn't provide real-time).

It is probably still a drop in the federal bucket.

> MP3 is about 1MB/minute

Depends on the bitrate and number of channels.

Phone calls are mono and probably something like 48kbps (96 / 2) which would be about 360kB per minute.

With a more modern audio codec like Opus, which does better at low bitrates, a minute at phone-line quality would take around 80-120 kB, one third of MP3. Which makes it even cheaper.

Good quality for a phone call is 2 * 64 kbps, but you can go down significantly (probably around 2 * 8 kbps; that's more than GSM half-rate, with modern codecs it could actually sound acceptable). [edit: added spaces to avoid multiplication being misinterpreted as formatting]

More importantly, in order to effectively exploit these phone calls, they'll want to transcribe them. Transcription AI is getting better and cheaper every year, especially when you can use custom hardware. Then, you can store the full voice recording for "interesting" calls (e.g. activists, their contacts, people with "suspicious" patterns etc. - it doesn't have to be accurate, storage is cheap) for a few years, and transcripts for everyone basically forever.

Encrypt your calls people!

> they'll want to transcribe them.

That's how in the beginning of Brazil 1985 film Archibald Buttle got arrested.

> around 2 * 8 kbps; that's more than GSM half-rate, with modern codecs it could actually sound acceptable

It’s not only acceptable, it’s widely used. I.e. lots of companies use g711 codec with 64kbps for internal intra-office communication and g729 with 8kbps voice bitrate for inter-office communication (with transcoders on the perimeters). It has been quite a standard approach to corporate voip design for years (decades). That said there is currently a shift to modern high- and adaptive-bitrate codecs, but it’s not instant.

> and g729 with 8kbps voice bitrate for inter-office communication

Why do they do that?

Even if 1000 people are making a phone call at the same time, that's just 64 Mbps each way if go for the full bandwidth, and an office this size surely must have a beefier Internet connection than that. Why skimp on something so cheap?

$20 million in data centre costs and $2.4 billion a year in consultancy fees.

Of course a big part of what the NSA does is manage the scale. To do that they need metadata both collected with the calls (e.g. what numbers the call was from and to, if available who or what that number belonged to at the time) and assembled by analysing the audio ("male speaker", "Russian language", phrases or words maybe phonetically)

After all it's all very well having every phone call, but you can't possibly listen to them all, so you need a way to find those that you do want to listen to.

"Pervasive Monitoring is an Attack" is current policy of the IETF and accordingly new protocols are intended to combat such monitoring, but there is a lot of metadata revealed by your activities and masking it takes considerable effort, while outfits like the NSA are very enthusiastic about gathering whatever metadata they can find and discovering new ways to collect more.

Some inside information - the recordings are stored in WAV files, and here's the size of a few samples - - 4.2 MB for 8:38 min - 3.4 MB for 6:49 min - 0.93 KB for 1:57 min

From what we found only a small fraction of the population's recordings are stored on the Militsiya servers. This does not rule out the possibility that all phone calls are recorded and only some are being transferred to the servers of the Militsiya when requested.

If you still read this thread.

What is the exact size of the archive? How many phone numbers does it include?

Also, please respect privacy of citizens, even those you dislike, including the emergency service callers. First, user data is user data, no matter if it's stored by a lawbreaking, in your opinion, organization. (Consider: google was fined for fiscal fraud - does it entitle anyone to steal google user's data?). People complained about car signals were in their right - traffic rules forbid signalling in the city, except to prevent accidents. And similarly for most of the cases, I think. And your access to their data will never be rightful. Second, exposing the people can fuel the division in the society and alienate the sides. What was done in a moment of annoyance, after being exposed, and possibly followed in bullying or hate campaigns, can make those exposed people scrupulously report all opposition supporters. Neighbor against neighbor, colleague against colleague, etc.

There are a few different archive. There's mobile phone recordings and there's MIA's (MVD) internal telephony calls recordings. Both of them together are around 1TB.

We protect the data of ordinary citizens. "user data is user data, no matter if it's stored by a lawbreaking, in your opinion" - we never claimed it is. We leak only personal data of people that committed crimes or assisted the fascist regime in Belarus in committing crimes.

We won't leak anymore data of people that just reported car signals and alike (even though they knew what would be the consequences of making such reports). We're focused on more high profile crimes.

Devision in the society already exists. We influence the "game theory" equations, deter people from being violent towards others in the future.

MP3 doesn't adequately capture just how low bandwidth phone codecs are.

Voice is on the order of < 1K bits / second, MP3 is complete overkill for voice.

1 k bytes per second. You can [1] squish it down to 1 kbit/s but it will become hard to understand accurately at that point, even under good conditions, and hopeless if there is noise. Opus simply doesn't support bitrates below 6 kbps.

[1] https://www.rowetel.com/?page_id=452

That's exactly the codec that I had in mind when I wrote that. Regardless, MP3 is overkill, and 10Kbps is still a small fraction of what MP3 would use (the lowest MP3 bitrate iirc is 32kbps, which is still more than three times as large). Besides that, MP3 just isn't tuned for voice applications.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com