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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."
More than storage capacity, they need software and/or manpower to analyze everything. More likely his superiors just lied to his face about this or he was paid to say such things to make people think twice about doing any rebellious shit.
This combination doesn`t exist: ETIs that know about humanity and want to see us dead. Otherwise we wouldn't exist.
Ahhh if only the government would be so kind as to freely back up all the classic usenet celebrity fakes of Gillian Anderson and provide them free of charge on the open internet as a public service. This world would be on the right path indeed.
Well we already know they have the means to do keyword searches on a great deal of data. Carnivore has been debated openly before congress so I would definitely have to agree thats the minimum capability to expect.
Not to assert one way or the other whether he's telling the truth, but...
It's much more sensible to record everything and keep it for a short while and then begin a process of attrition. If everything is accessible for 1 hour, that's pretty powerful because you can freeze data after an event happens and look for what you need. After one hour, maybe only certain things and certain people are tracked for up to a day... then a week... a month... a year...
Asking people to think is like asking them to buy you a new car
This guy seems to be implying that the government has some kind of man-in-middle technology that intercepts and records *all* traffic, which simply isn't true.
The majority of the internet goes over telecom links. The few parts of it that don't, almost always have at least one hop that transits one of the major carriers networks. They don't have to monitor "all" traffic. They just have to monitor one of the hops in the chain.
All IP traffic can be reduced to a stream. TCP/IP has some extra error-correction options to keep it all in order, but a stream is a stream nonetheless. And when you start looking at very large data sets, you're going to quickly discover that the majority of it is just a copy of another set of data.
People here seem to think that monitoring all network traffic is unrealistic because of the storage considerations, but they don't have to store every byte; Just the unique bytes. If you download the CNN homepage, the storage application doesn't need to hold onto that entire transaction; It can just record the headers and timestamp, and then reference the same stream that a few hundred thousand other people also downloaded.
Most of the internet's traffic isn't encrypted, and so the amount of entropy on it is low, despite the very high bandwidth. This statistical fact paired with shannon's laws, which in turn are based on the laws of thermodynamics, provide the basis of a practical surveillance solution.
When you add in intelligent filtering, the amount of data to be stored drops even more. You probably don't need to worry about terrorists communicating via Netflix for example; And that makes up a significant chunk of internet traffic (look it up; it's a surprise).
The other thing about intelligence assets is that they all have a 'use by' date. The more time goes by, the less valuable the data becomes. Eventually, you reach a point of diminishing returns; That is the point at which you can safely delete the data. It doesn't matter whether it contained terrorist communications or the next 9/11 or not... if you haven't found it by the cutoff time, it's worthless.
Combine these attributes and what this man is saying is, in fact, achievable. Now... processing that data and turning into useful, timely, and accurate intelligence... that, people, is a whole 'nother can of worms. And realistically, where the bulk of the resources is going to be. Storage is a non-starter. Analysis is the bitch of it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Think of the sheer amount of storage, electricity, infrastructure, personal, computing resources and so on that you would need in order to perform this feat. The numbers would be boggling and would account for a significant portion of the worldwide sales of all hard drives, tape back ups etc, etc.
Well, the internet was clocking about 21 exabytes per month in 2010. However, the overwhelming majority of that traffic is redundant; if you remove the redundancy in the data set and then compress it, you're probably looking at less than an exabyte of data over the public internet. You can reduce that further with whitelists; Traffic from Netflix, for example, is probably not going to contain super secret terrorist communications.
So let's say you can cut that down to only record the most relevant 5%. That's about 1 exabyte. How much would that cost? Well, in 2008, they guesstimated this to be about $400 million. A single stealth bomber costs about $2.1 billion; So the yearly storage costs of "the internet" is about 2 stealth bombers. -_-
So at least as far as the data storage is concerned, I think it's well within the government's budget. Now, making that data usable and analysis of it... hooo boy... that's gonna be the bitch of it. But storage? Solved.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
"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."
No, the public record is clear. It's not a "switch room", it's a splitter. And yes, the technical and expense implications of that have been debated and re-debated, re-hashed and triple-warmed-over.
They are splitters. And they send ALL the digital data on fiber that enter those exchanges directly to government. No packet inspection (at those locations, anyway), and no "taps". Just a "Y" in the fibers.
(Yes, I realize that technically it's quite a bit more complicated than that, because it involves amplifiers and lots of other things. This, too, was brought up in the court case. But that's what it is. It's in the public court records. Again: that's why the telcos were given immunity. Where were you when this was all going on?)