Slashdot Mirror
Former FBI Agent: All Digital Communications Stored By US Gov't
New submitter davesays writes "CNN anchors Erin Burnett and Carol Costello have interviewed Former FBI Counterterrorisim specialist Tim Clemente. In the interviews he asserts that all digital communications are recorded and stored. Clemente: 'No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.' 'All of that stuff' — meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on U.S. soil, with or without a search warrant — 'is being captured as we speak.' 'No digital communication is secure,' by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications — meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like — are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is."
He's not right. I've worked at a non-Bell telco, and they don't capture anything not ordered by a specific warrant, and only then, for the warrant, and no more than necessary to comply with the order.
I've heard rumors that AT&T captures all, but never anything that confirms that. Perhaps he meant that the major carriers provide streaming replicas of all traffic to the government, who then archives some (or all) of it. But I know for a fact that "all" is just plain wrong.
Learn to love Alaska
"'ve heard rumors that AT&T captures all, but never anything that confirms that. "
It most certainly is confirmed. In a court case some years ago, a technician outed that the government had installed a splitter in a special room in one of their exchanges, which fed ALL of their digital data straight to the government. The telcos involved admitted that it was only one of many such. Mass collection, and no warrants involved, anywhere.
In fact, that was the whole reason Congress voted to give telcos immunity, remember? How short our memories can be.
A switch room that contains a deep packet scanner is not the same thing as sending ALL internet traffic to a storage system. More likely it's just a tap.
The thing that makes me doubt this is the cost. To funnel a copy of the internet to the Feds would require building a shadow internet plus storage for the whole thing.
There's not a lot of storage necessary. Not what you're thinking. Text messages and chats are very small in size. Phone conversations are very small using the right codecs. I also heard once about 8 years ago that the US government was buying up symmetrix like they were going out of style.
Honestly, I believe it. It's entirely possible.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Sovereign immunity... and it has existed for far longer than this nation has.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
The average cell phone usage is 459 minutes/month * 300 M cell phones / 2 * 60 sec * 3 KB/sec = 13,000 PB/month (uncompressed).
Why the "/ 2"/ Assuming that every phone call made from a cell phone is also to a cell phone? And not doing compression, but doing dedup?
I don't know how others use theirs, but most of my phone calls aren't social, but to businesses and their land lines.
Anyhow, CTIA lists 2.30 Teraminutes yearly per December 2012. Presumably that's also counting cell-to-cell twice, which I'm sure the three letter agencies would record twice too (if nothing else to record what was said when there's a drop-out in the connection on either end). That's 138 Teraseconds, which at 3 kB/s would be 414 PB per year, before compression.
That's a far cry from your 13,000 PB per month (or 156 EB per year), and spread out over multiple providers absolutely doable from a capacity viewpoint. Especially since it doesn't have to be online for a year, but can go on tape. If ten datacenters recorded this, with a fluctuation of 40% in data density between them, and flushed everything to tape within a week, each would need less than 2 PB of online storage.
But do I believe they do so? No. If they did, they wouldn't have a way to mine the data. It would possibly be useful as evidence after the fact, but not for monitoring purposes. It's way too much data.
Here is Klein's statement.
https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/SER_klein_decl.pdf
The splitter sent the internet traffic to a secure room.
And another interview with Klein:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interviews/klein.html
It's pretty obvious that room contained a Narus DPI. End of story.
> I seem to recall that rumor used to have it that only all calls in and out of the USA were monitored,
That looks like the NSA's legal requirements to monitor only foreign communications. They were prohibited from monitoring domestic communications, that was the responsibility of the FBI. Unfortunately, "Homeland Security" was created in the wake of 9/11 specifically to merge and organize data among the various intelligence services, and part of the result is that you can't effectively prosecute one agency for overstepping its bounds by going to the other agencies. They can all rely on Homeland Security to cover for them with "Patriot Act" court free search orders, or groundless "national security" orders that prevent even disclosing that your clients have been monitored.
Homeland Security is an extremely dangerous concentration of monitoring and investigation power. I sincerely hope that the antipathy of the more specialized intelligence agencies continues to hinder their growth.
DPI = deep packet inspection. A TCP/IP packet contains header(s) and body. The header tells you the address and some info re the protocol. The body is the content. Most internet infrastructure only cares about the header. Something that is capable of DPI will recover the content of some types of packets. Which ones depends on the capability of the DPI unit you use.
So if you want to search for email sent to joe@there.com you need to use DPI because the email header is in the body.
Use of a splitter is step one for DPI.
This article talks about the AT&T / Mark Klein incident:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_packet_inspection#United_States