NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls | Hacker News Reader

NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

washingtonpost.com

175 pointsweu63 comments

Read foreign country as US here too.

Basically they can record everything and a constitutionally defined "search" doesn't occur unless a human search and looks at the information.

Binney and other were talking about this even long before Snowden.

So what happens now, everything you do gets recorded, stored in their data center and kept for decades. As soon as you do anything they deem suspicious they might find you downloaded strange foot fetish porn when you were in college and try to blackmail you.

> As soon as you do anything they deem suspicious they might find you downloaded strange foot fetish porn

At least long term, it's more like: As soon as you are a political opponent...

(Thinking back, General Petraeus' fatal love affair emails that surfaced suddenly may have been such an instance.)

> they might find you downloaded strange foot fetish porn when you were in college and try to blackmail you.

So, you'll join the fight to make this a non-scandalous point of concern, right?

That's how I feel about revenge porn/leaked nude photos and videos of non-underage people in general. There should be legal consequences for people who leak this content against the wish of the people depicted, but I feel the media often plays up the narrative that people shouldn't take nude pictures (a pragmatic approach, but not the best going forward) and never mentions the silliness of reacting harshly to other people's sexuality.

However, the pragmatic approach is still needed in a world where many people can attack you for your idiosyncrasies. Depending on your current situation, you won't lose your job and your particular interest will become only a minor office joke, but when you run for Congress, the masses may still care too much about it.

As someone mentioned on HN, the advantage of being transparent is that you can weaponize it — "I do (thing) and if that worries you, it's your problem, not mine".

And start downloading kinds of porn you have no interest in, just to confuse the snoops ;)

> Read foreign country as US here too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHhVhud8_kE

Echelon and Carnivore.

We have been talking about this since the 80s....

There have also been rumors about Amdocs [1] being kind of the Israeli counterpart. They do billing for telcos (i.e. determine who talked to whom for how long). The list of their customers is quite impressive.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdocs

These 'rumours' are more like an open secret inside the industry.

Personally I have seen billing APIs at AT&T (US) and T-Mobile (US) which are semi-equivalent. For one of those, calls go straight to an Amdocs domain on an AS hosted outside of the carrier. Of course, few people will see these now since Google Play canned external billing APIs (removing most of the interest here) and most new projects choose to access carrier billing via international aggregators (since integrating with one carrier can take months of pain, if you even have enough of a case to bother, and if they even talk to you). For NFC stuff, most US carriers are combining forces to produce a new API which will effectively similarly distance any integrators. The reason I got a look was we were developing the flagship app for Samsung Galaxy series device launch in the US, and the carriers were all on board with it.

An older, long term IT veteran friend of mine who recently retired in Australia and chaired the mobile phone number portability multi-carrier technical implementation roundtable told me he was essentially fired (contract not renewed) for opening up an inquiry in to the wasteful billing practices at one particular Australian carrier. It turned out they were using Amdocs. He described making a decision, being forced to sit through a presentation, making the same decision, being forced to sit through another presentation, until the end of this contract period.

This and other sources concur: the Amdocs billing stuff's like cancer. Once they're in your network, you can't get rid of them. If I were a national privacy authority or the European Data Protection Supervisor, I'd walk in to all my carriers, seize all third party billing systems, dump out disk images, and analyze them top to bottom in a nationally transparent, multi-party audit citing national security / privacy.

> This and other sources concur: the Amdocs billing stuff's like cancer. Once they're in your network, you can't get rid of them

So I guess the possible Mossad connection is the only reason why SAP isn't buying Amdocs, then?

Ca you elaborate?

Why would SAP be averse?

If the country that this article was referring to was the US, do you really think that Barton Gellman would let a scoop go like that?

I'm sure the first response will be something alluding to the US government secretly threatening the author if he revealed this, to which I would preemptively point out that this is the same man who has yet to receive any legal indictment and continues to walk the streets freely after revealing the PRISM program last year.

This is really nauseating. Which kind of world are we letting happen ?

the spooks are merely taking a liking to how politicians operate their political campaigns. Nothing secret is beyond a court order or, a friend in the right place.

Evidence?

Here's your fucking evidence:

The FBI had access to the Boston bombers phone calls.

* http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs-july-dec1... (important part at 2:10)

* http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telepho...

I'll quote the slip up of Tim Clemente, a former FBI agent:

> All digital communications are uh uh... There's a way to look at digital communications in the past. And I can't go into detail of how that's done or what's done but I can tell you that no digital communication is secure.

The FBI is tasked with cases on US soil involving US persons.

How does that that give the FBI legitimacy to record phone calls of US citizens?

Ever hear about the mafia and RICO laws? It is 100% legal to listen to phone conversations with a warrant. If you have evidence of wholesale FBI phone call collection and eavesdropping I'd love to see it.

I already linked you the evidence in my previous post. Stop being purposely obtuse. At this point you just seem to be part of another NSA program. [1]

I'll just quote the lead:

> The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

And more recently, GCHQ's JTRIG program. [2]

Again, I'll quote:

> (The core self-identified purposes of JTRIG is to) use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable

[1]: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-ope...

[2]: https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...

That is illegal? I see propaganda every time I flip by Fox News.

Stop downvoting what you disagree with....

I have wondered about this with the whole damn thing, on those days when I am wearing my extra thick tinfoil hat.

Think about it from the Dr Strangelove cold war perspective that a doomsday device would only be an effective deterrent if everyone knew about it.

Perhaps they have put all the cables in, but really do not have the resources to back up or process 99% of it.

This is not that much of a problem for them if they leak a load of powerpoint slides claiming that they do, as the result is an instant global version of Benway's panopticon, with people behaving as though they are surveilled, even when they are not.

Perhaps Snowden never stopped working for the NSA.

Then I remember that tinfoil hats were invented by the government to help focus radio waves onto the brain http://web.archive.org/web/20100708230258/http://people.csai... and I decide to go and watch cartoons.

On reflection, there is probably such a thing as reading too much Robert Anton Wilson.

The article is evidence of the capability. And if you look at other leaks you see a clear pattern of them vacuuming up all the data they possibly can.

Then take into consideration their budget and various data centers and it seems that they are capable of doing this at any scale desired.

So they've shown the desire and capability. It's not direct evidence but it's pretty strong.

Sure, but collecting and recording phone calls of US citizens is illegal and there hasn't been any evidence of this happening. Metadata of who you called and when has never been protected by the 4th Amendment so we can head that off...

"Illegal" in the same way that saying "No" to congress when the real answer was "Yes" is. Then later explaining that iw was "the least possible untruthful answer".

The NSA have twisted their use of language - to try and claim that "recording phone calls of US citizens" isn't an illegal act until a human being listens to one of those recordings.

I'm 99.999% sure that a "jury of peers" would not interpret the law that way. (Which might be why the need "special courts" without juries…)

There is no evidence of the NSA recording phone calls of US citizens, that is just speculation.

The NSA doesn't have to record phone calls of US citizens. They just get one of the other Five Eyes countries to do it for them, in a quid pro quo arrangement that circumvents the inconvenient rule of law in several places at once.

You're carrying water for some seriously un-American people. The only reason you're not upset about it is that it doesn't seem to be affecting you, personally, at the moment.

That is a very good point, this might not have been explicitly said (or I just didn't read about it yet) but I just kind of assumed it works this way. We spy on your people we spy on our people and then we share if we find something interesting.

Other countries also might not have the same supposed privacy guarantees in their constitution so it doesn't even have to be symmetric (say Australians somehow spy both on us and their citizens).

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence in this case.

Absence of evidence is not evidence.

Simple. You don't need a petabyte-scale data center if all you're doing is "storing metadata."

If you want the truth about what these asshats are up to, just read their electric bill.

"At the request of U.S. officials, The Washington Post is withholding details that could be used to identify the country where the system is being employed or other countries where its use was envisioned"

Therefore there is no point to the article.

> Therefore there is no point to the article.

I disagree. What difference does it make _which_ foreign country the article refers to?

The fact that 100% of calls made by all people in a country are being recorded by another country is enough.

It's enough to make it interesting, but there could be a much more interesting diplomatic scandal depending on which country is targeted. Imagine if it's not Yemen or Iran, but Canada or Switzerland?

Raise your hand if you think its US domestic soil, if not now, how about in the future...

The status quo is then restored.

All this article is is chest-pounding by the US to warn potential competitors in the global sphere of influence.

Or it could serve as a signal that the US is the best country to align with, since they know everything.

This whole NSA debacle could serve as an impressive advertisement for the strength and stability of the industrial spying complex, justifying great investment and pushing important business objectives.

s/could/does

What is wrong with that? The program described in the article is legal.

If it's legal, then we need to change the laws.

Slavery was legal once too.

Pretend that it is Pakistan.

"Nobody is listening to your telephone calls," Mr. Obama said. "That's not what this program is about."

It's about recording your calls to listen to later.

In this context, the troubles with that statement are "your" and "this program".

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130729/12223823986/senat...

It says NSA only keeps 1 month of voice records. I think they store everything for couple of years, perhaps indefinitely. Storing all that voice is very cheap and is too juicy to let go. Also there were rumors about this recording for the past 30 years.

GSM voice codec has rate 13 kbit/s. 6 billion people x 1 hour of talking per day = 6e9 x 3600 x 13/8 = 35 TB/day.

As with most newspaper articles that have government officials providing material input, what isn't said is usually more important that what is. (That's true in any context, not just NSA -- read stories about your local Mayor and road projects with a critical eye too)

The article states nothing at all about retention.

I doubt they only store it for a month. Besides how cheap (in national security budget terms) it is to store everything indefinitely, the timespan of a month is just not enough time to gather enough intelligence, especially when you don't know what you're looking for.

If you're already capturing everything, you want a big picture, and a big picture isn't something you get with just what's been happening for the past month.

If they ever delete stuff, it's based on tiers with different priorities (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7394346), not an arbitrary period.

GSM voice codec has rate 13 kbit/s.

Wasn't there a story very recently about new voice compression bringing voice storage down by 30%? I'm not even sure GSM was the go-to beforehand. So I'd say, halve that estimate and you're ballpark current.

6 billion people x 1 hour of talking per day = 6e9 x 3600 x 13/8 = 35 TB/day

I'd say most places more like 15 minutes per person as a maximum average, generally even less. That means 4.3TB/day. Which is only a couple of $200 hard disks, or four if you want RAID1.

And you can even divide by 2, I assume it's 13 kbit/s for each conversation, not each party of the conversation.

Even if they only store the most of it for a month, I will eat my shorts if they do not use ML or plain old "intelligence" to select much of it for indefinite storage.

I posted this spreadsheet in another thread to give an idea of the cost of storing all of the nation's calls.

I figured an annual cost of about $11 million.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqWtA_3af-R0dE5...

(the spreadsheet allows editing, so you all can play with the numbers).

I'm pretty sure 96,000 bits/s vastly overstates the required storage. Common VoIP codecs uses as little as 5,300 bits/s[1] and military communication systems typically only require 2,400 bits/s and can go as low as 600 bits/sec[2]. Note: this is before all the transport overhead.

And this is for live communications. Recorded voice communication can be compressed further. For example the popular G.729 VoIP codec compresses down to something like 1,000 bits/sec in archives from it's normal 8,000 bits/s required during a live call[3]. Although lower bandwidth codecs probably don't compress as much.

Please correct me if I am wrong - not an expert.

[1] http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-qualit...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FNBDT#Voice_compression_using_V...

[3] http://call-recording.tmcnet.com/topics/call-recording/artic...

Agreed. I didn't have any reliable numbers at the time so I overestimated in favor of making it more expensive.

Brewster Kahle of archive.org ran the numbers last year as well:

https://blog.archive.org/2013/06/15/cost-to-store-all-us-pho...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuqlWHQKlooOdGJ...

That's remarkably cheap.

What does it cost to transcribe All VOICE calls ->TEXT for faster analysis, apply DEEP learning to it, and apply a graph of Everyone bigger than Facebook to these patterns?

The voice->text is inaccurate enough (especially because the many different languages that can be used) so you have to keep the original recording and not just the text; but yes, you can easily do things like "find all conversations where the word 'nakamoto' is heard" with mass scale voice/speech analysis.

Just going by energy need I back-of-the-envelope estimated the Bluffdale center could run voice recognition on all U.S. voice calls, yes. I'd guess it's not the best use of that much power, currently, but it'll only get easier.

I was just talking about the cost of storage, not acquisition or analysis.

I wonder if it's not Afghanistan, Iran or any of the usual suapecta but actually Canada. We've got a puppet federal government submissive to US demands.. A small number of large NSA friendly telcos that reach a large majority of the population, and a large number of immigrants from all over the world. Perfect testing ground for such a system.

Why not all 3 and throw in the US as well?

The goal is too record everything which means implementing programs like this in as many countries as they can. Actually identifying which countries such programs are currently operating in would be tricky without a leak. It's a real shame this article didn't publish it.

This makes me wonder how Greenwald, Gellman, and Poitras come to a consensus on what to hold back. Clearly they all have access to the data and it would be possible (read: very likely) for them to disagree on what should and should not be withheld.

Sadly, it seems that the majority have become inured to the offensive over reach of agencies such as NSA, GCHQ, etc.

The only way to play it as if the country where the system is being employed is your own.

Yes, I said it... I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the aforementioned country is the USA.

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