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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

If YouTube exists (specifically their math of adding X hours of video per minute), there's absolutely no question as to whether the Feds can store every phone call. That's trivial.

The NSA has a $15+ billion budget. The FBI has a $8 billion budget. The US military has a $638 whatever odd billion budget. The intelligence budget is $80 or so billion.

Yeah they can afford it. That is not an issue.

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In terms of storage costs, a phone call can be compressed and stored quite efficiently

Yeah, now that I read this, the scary thing is that it's so cheap, that /not only organizations with huge budgets/ can store every single phone call.

iow Many fortune 500 companies and foreign governments, all with less legal scruples, security and obligations than the NSA could also store every single phone call made in the U.S. - if they can get their hands on a copy.

Hell, I imagine any decent organized crime syndicate could scrape up $27M to store all the data and start mining it for information about when homes are unprotected.

Having all of these calls stored in one place is a HUGE liability. I said -if they can get their hands on a copy- which will be hard to get it from the NSA... unless there are inside jobs at the NSA and unless there are no external contractors with less scruples, security, etc. in place.

IOW, I'm not as scared of the government having access to this data (although I'm against it), but it's even scarier that 3rd parties can gain access to it.

Very important to note: it's not so much an issue for private companies (non-telecom carriers) as to whether they can get their hands on something like phone calls. It's extraordinarily illegal to mass record / copy phone conversations (that are not yours; and sometimes even when they are yours, depending on states and notice given) if you're a private business or individual. I can't emphasize extraordinarily illegal enough. If you wanted to get into deep shit real fast, and you're a mid level Fortune 500 company, start tapping into all the nation's phone calls and save a copy of said calls. The Feds would literally destroy you, not an exaggeration; you would never walk right again.

I'm assuming in my example that the government isn't the one giving the calls / data to a private company, and that said company is doing the spying itself.

It's illegal for the NSA to record it too though, right?

It was illegal for the telcos to go along with the first round of warrantless wiretapping, it took an act of congress to make it retroactively legal.

However, I imagine that the courts might be sympathetic to a large company recording + mining all phone calls made with company phones, since they already went that route with e-mail.

...transcripted to text and compressed. even better.

If it's automatic...

But I believe there's value in keeping the recording, for voice matching, recording of other sounds in the call, etc

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