NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls (2006) | Hacker News Reader

NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls (2006)

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Its interesting that much less fuss was made about basically the same story back then. Why the difference? Perhaps:

(1) the definite proof was missing, it was just 'a source' said something

(2) in 2006, it was G W Bush, so people weren't that surprised

(3) it was just 5 years since 9-11 so people accepted it more easily

(4) it was before everyone understood the geo-data that phone calls include

(5) General public (beyond IT professionals) have a better understanding of data and privacy now, after years of facebook and targeted ads

FISA was passed in 1978 because of domestic spying and has always allowed spying of US citizens who meet certain criteria.

This debate has been going on for 30 years, "meta data" or "geo data" isn't required. This is the NSA we are talking about, they literally have secret patents which can physically target communication sources based on latency and other variables.

The police can track your vehicle movements (if there is a cop that can read your license plate, I forgot what their system is called, it's going in a database with location and time), many many random mobile app providers can track your movements, so why would anyone be surprised that the largest and most advanced spying agency has the capability and motive to monitor US citizens. My point is that there is not much use in all of this fuss, it's been suspected (assumed) for decades that the NSA uses some legal loophole or special permission to gather all data. And even if they didn't, who is going to stop them?

Does anyone think that ANY crimes have been prevented because the person though, "geeze, the NSA will probably see this and pass it to the FBI, maybe I shouldn't hack or steal or murder". Probably. Not saying it's right or wrong, but an interesting piece of the puzzle to consider.

Less fuss? I remember plenty of talk going on about this -- it hit the front page of many newspapers including the NYT and the Washington Post. The administration even acknowledged it to a degree. People have just forgotten.

And they will forget again, because just as before it's not being abused.

(6) This time we have Edward Snowden, the sympathetic hero-figure who is on the run from the US government.

The human brain is hard-wired to care about people, not about abstract threats.

This story was already huge before Edwards name came up

Why not anonymize the data and make a hackathon (the goal being to identify potential terrorists? i don't know)? Why not give it back to the taxpayers who paid for its collection? I know two wrongs don't make a right, but maybe something good could come out of this.

The data that the NSA is valuable precisely because it isn't anonymous. You can't make any worthwhile statistical discoveries with truly anonymous data because you don't really know what you are measuring. Any information that they don't strip before releasing it (which they won't) could be traced back to a certain person or organization that the metadata is about.

The Boston bombers weren't caught because of cellphone data. They were caught because they engaged the police in a gunfight; one of the brothers escaped, and he was caught because a man reported that his boat had a blood trail on it.

They actually were tracked by the cell phone of the man whose car they hijacked. Obviously, this was only a small part of the story and isn't the same kind of cellphone data.

You are downvoted, but this is exactly what eventually happened with the Stasi archives (those that were saved from destruction), and is exactly what I wish to one day see in America.

Anonymizing the data would make it useless.

Tokenizing/pseudonymizing the data would make it identifiable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak

The NSA may have had such a database for a very long time indeed. The earliest documents I can find mentioning Dayton go back to 1994, but I think I recall hearing about Daytona much earlier.

Considering that FISA was passed in 1978 and that the NSA has been around since the 1950s, I would assume that domestic wiretapping has been going on the entire time. They absolutely have to say publicly that they are not recording any US citizens data, but year after year there are leaks that say otherwise.

Maybe 98% of NSA employees were required to not intercept any US citizen transmissions but there has likely always been a division of the NSA that is devoted to domestic spying. The agency would be completely ineffective if they didn't allow recording domestic communications.

Since the phone story isn't news, how do they manage to make a such a big deal out of it?

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