Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?
guardian.co.uk
guardian.co.uk
If you don't believe the US is already permanently archiving vast swaths of communication, it's not a big leap of imagination to picture it happening in five or ten years. Likewise the government might not have the computer power to analyze those archives today, but in five or ten years, I'd bet on it.
Some people don't mind that the government stores their emails. "I'm fine with it because I know they're going to catch the bad guys" or "I'm fine with it because I have nothing to hide". Those are certainly powerful (though flawed) arguments for the situation today. Those people are perhaps picturing filing cabinets in some dank warehouse filled with paper printouts of their emails, which due to space constraints will be shredded or forgotten in ten years. The reality is that thanks to technology, what we say today is being stored and archived for-ev-er and can be indexed and retrieved easily and indefinitely. Why does that make a difference? Because today, what you say and do might be lawful. But laws and societies change over time, and the government will still be able to go back and dig up what you said decades ago and use it against you.
That's really what scares me--because today, I, like most people, don't have much to hide. But who knows what laws or culture will be like in 20 years, and what can be used against me that I said so very long ago? Can you imagine working at the WTC and having a bad day, and jokingly sending an email to a coworker about bombing the place because you're so mad. 9/11 happens a year later, the government looks in its archives for the email you sent, and in a post-9/11 frenzy sends you to Guantanamo to "await trial". Or it doesn't even have to go that far; some government spokesperson lets your name slip in an interview as a "suspect" and the media attention you'll get will forever ruin your life even if the government does nothing.
If everyone is using Tor, for example, there is a lower probability that any given Tor user is engaging in activity the government does not approve of. And the more "legitimate" users there are, the harder it is to criminalize users.
Are you currently putting code behind that yourself? We could always use contributions and help with new and ongoing OSS projects at Open Whisper Systems.
Unless the government gets out of the business of handling birth certificates, driver's licenses, etc. they're simply going to have your name.
Secure communications channels is certainly an important topic though, but given what happened to Sunil Tripathi in the aftermath of the Reddit swarm to find the Boston Marathom bomber(s), perhaps it's possible that your biggest "online threat" in the future won't be part of the government at all.
You get the wrong Google, Facebook, or random datacenter sysadmin upset and you could find yourself in hot water with even less of a legal recourse. It's just as easy to imagine roving bands of vigilantes in that dystopian future as it is to imagine Big Brother, is it not?
I get why this (COMSEC) is an important problem; what I don't get is why so many otherwise very intelligent persons focus on the government as the sole problem area. The government is mostly staffed by either those who are actually idealistic, or those who are too incompetent to hack it in the private sector. Certainly Google and Facebook have better IT infrastructure than 99% of the government.
P.S. The U.S. Constitution forbids "ex post facto" laws that make previously legal behavior illegal after-the-fact. If you believe that the Constitution actually means anything you shouldn't worry about currently legal things being held against you in 20 years. If you believe the Constitution won't hold up in 20 years then it's kind of pointless to worry about any of the other laws, they'd be just as shredded.
Prosecuting for something that was legally done in the past is a whole different issue.
However, taking away someone's ability to make a living (see the Hollywood blacklist, etc.) is leverage that can be used to control behavior. The HUAC hearings were a big bad thing that was done. It wasn't as bad as slavery, for example, but it is something that happened very recently and I think we want to avoid.
I always get confused in these threads because I cannot separate those who are worried about the privacy of their data from those who simply hate the government (or even the idea of government).
If you're trying to deploy a cryptosystem that relies on popularity to be really useful, then you'll need to get "average Joe" to buy into it, and I suspect the best way to do that is to point out all of the possible Big Brothers out there, not just rabble-rabble about the gubbmint alone.
The twist this puts on "having nothing to hide" is that it means you have to trust everything you say now will forever be considered benign, rather than just at this particular moment in history.
Open Whisper Systems is a project I work on to help untap your phone: http://www.whispersystems.org
Now, today the prevailing view is that the 4th amendment is that illegal searches are unconstitutional even if the exclusionary rule can't be invoked (see, Bivens v. Six Unknown Named FBI Agents), but there is still this contour in the law that distinguishes collecting data from trying to bring it into evidence.
The argument here is probably wrong, but not ridiculous.
We can't blame power for establishing systems of control, just as we can't blame a tiger for mauling a zoo keeper: it's the nature of the thing. It's what we should expect, no matter how much time we spend coaxing or training it.
I'd much rather invest energy into developing solutions that allow us to communicate securely, rather than investing energy into asking those with power not to monitor our insecure communication.
No it's not, it's a system of human beings. Systems make "decisions" quite differently than individuals do. In some cases they have what we might consider far superior reasoning ability compared to the individual, but in others they're even more limited than the tiger.
We are so far off the reservation that we have given up on trying to reclaim our government and instead, must now find ways to protect ourselves from our government.
That's a powerful statement about the plight of our nation.
The fact that we have 300 million citizens and majority will cannot be expressed is exactly a symptom of this condition. The government is no longer the people, but a separate entity with its own agendas. Agendas which frequently run counter to the interests of the people.
Legal or otherwise, I'd rather not have money deducted from my paycheck and spent on data centers to store all of my phone calls and email.
http://binged.it/116pwHR (Yes, Bing has more recent arial shot of the construction)
Edit - Ha, I see someone else here mentioned this place already. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5656751
How many minutes does the average person spend on the phone per day? I found some numbers in the range from 6 to 28 minutes per day. Let's just pick 15 minutes. This times the population of the states (313.9 million) divided by two yields 39,237,500 hours per day. Storing this at 8 kbps requires about 128.5 TiB per day or 45.8 PiB per year.
At $40 per TiB this is less than 2 million dollars per year. So technically and economically this should actually be possible. But that is just storing. Performing speech recognition, analyzing the data and extracting information is probably the much harder task and I would guess that it is still infeasible to do this with all phone calls.
And when it will start happening, it will also apply to today's data.
I hope everyone else noticed this as well.
Even if the tech to do crazy analysis does not exist today, the tech to record all the data for future use is quite real.
That page talks about being able to store (hypothetically) 1 trillion TB.
https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-09/TOPLETZ/BHU...
All is indefinitely stored in case it should be required later.
It just doesn't make much sense.
[1] http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/verizon-rigmaiden-a...
One of the few advantages that smaller groups have against big systems is that big systems don't totally trust other people in their own systems. Even the police classify their information hierarchically - maybe this bit of information only needs to be known by inspectors in firearms units, etc ,etc.
In the end we get to something like in science fiction. Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief has externalized common memory and also your private memories that can be recovered. Also pieces of them that can be shared directly. Such centralized systems have a whole host of new security problems.
is buffering packets in a network device a recording? using metadata for traffic/performance analysis?
Dear CIA, FBI, NSA, DIA, DHS, TSA, etc:
Fuck you.
Thanks,
Mindcrime
I don't give a shit if they investigate me or not. One can't live one's entire life in fear, damnit. Either principles mean something and we need to stand up for and defend them, or not.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/cia-gus-hunt-big-da...
The CIA Chief Tech Officer. What more proof do you need? As if they're gonna let you have a peak at their data centers! If you don't believe they do it at whatever scale it's possible at this point, then you're delusional.
And, no, "The data storage that would be required for that" (logging every call) is not insane by any means. Even a medium-sized corporation could afford it nowadays, and we're talking about the government here.
Your name might be on a no-fly list, even though you aren't "crossing them." There might be "100% verified" data which links you to some event, as there was with Brandon Mayfield's fingerprints, even though that connection is 100% wrong.
These are all low-probability events. Odds are, you don't have to worry. But every time you have to wait in line for security screening, remember that it's a false positive because they are worrying about you crossing them.
They have finite funding and finite manpower. The hypothetical scenario in which half of America has "crossed" them, will not come to pass. When everyone is crossing them, they will be forced to triage.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
- attributed to Richelieu, Cardinal De
That's the fear - (or a large part of it anyway.)
You don't even have to cross them for them to do it - not in any significant way. Maybe you slight a cop and he decides to screw you if he can. Maybe you're just a figure on someone's KPIs. You don't have to cross someone - not really - for your desires to conflict.