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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."
I doubt they have the storage capacity.
Table-ized A.I.
...but really this just seems to be par for the course. In fact I'm thinking he's really just confirmed what we all knew deep down.
Someone correct me. It just doesn't seem feasible.
I'm sure what he's saying is true, in a very broad sense. Cell phone conversations, texts, and major/popular version of things like video chat (skype), IM (yahoo messenger), and general social media (facebook, twitter, etc).
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. Unfortunately, either he or the news agency is trying to paint the whole thing as just that.
I have done digital communication that never entered the internet. This includes LANs, corporate networks, the USB wire on my desk, the IPC pipe between 2 applications, etc. I've even send the old finger binary number 4 to someone optically. If they could record all these things, there would have to be a secret very high bandwidth network in-place connecting every digital device, which seems impractical, or even impossible.
Now, if you mean all traffic over the internet-backbone in the United States, sure, they could do that. Time for encryption everyone. At least Google likes to pipe their traffic though the corporate network around the internet backbone, so that needs a different approach to log.
The plaintext era is over.
Either this is true and so secret even most of law enforcement doesn't have access or it simply isn't true. Having run a large enough telecom operation to deal with CALEA I can say for sure that law enforcement very much needed our help to do anything with our customers' communications. Not only did they need to come to us with proper warrants in the first place, but they barely had enough technology sense to be able to do anything with it. Anything more complicated than taps and CDRs never even came up.
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' â" meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on U.S. soil, with or without a search warrant â" '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 â" meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like â" 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."
Dear US official;
All of my communications are sent via encrypted proxy, and set to stream constantly. The proxy dumps into Tor and a half-dozen other networks. I originally did this for shits and giggles, to see how hard it would be. I will admit the latency is a bit higher than doing it locally, but it is very usable in spite of this. I also signed up for the Tor Cloud project and run an EC2 micro-instance to help others do the same.
Originally, I just did this as an experiment, but after reading things like what you're saying and realizing that we've become a surveillance state on par with Iran, China, and North Korea (where did they get their filtering and monitoring hardware from again? Oh right: We gave it to them), I decided to keep it.
I don't do anything special with my super duper encrypted "all the things" setup. I wish I could say I was some elite ninja hacker or something, but all I really do is browse internet forum sites and read the BBC news, and you know, download a few TV shows here and there. I'm one of those people that doesn't have anything to hide per-se, but when I live under the tyranny of a government that has turned their citizens into the enemy -- the attitude that we're all criminals or potential criminals, and must be monitored pre-emptively, I feel like it's my duty to frustrate the hell out of people like you.
So I have been helping friends, family, and strangers, set their computers up the same way. Yeah, I know, some of them will probably use their newfound freedom and anonymity for evil, but frankly, even a terrorist attack a week and all the rantings in the world from you (that may even be justified) about how criminals can use this technology for their own nefarious purposes, doesn't deter me.
You crossed a line; Morally, ethically, constitutionally. By criminalizing the average citizen, you have become a bigger danger than all the terrorists, all the "real" criminals. You are corrupt, dangerous, and seek to undermine our democratic way of life. You hide in the shadows and see conspiracies everywhere, and are convinced of your own righteous cause. You are as dangerous as a religious fundamentalist, because just like their dogmas, yours demands absolute purity. There will always be more justifications to invade the privacy of others.
So I will continue to teach anyone who wants to, how to fight back against your tyranny. You're a threat to the way of life of not just myself, but my peers. You're a danger to all Americans -- you view us as the enemy. Your own people.
You've lost your way.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
This is probably the most telling bit of it:
CLEMENTE: We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.
Basically, this capability exists, can and does get used, BUT the fruits of which aren't directly presented in the courts, because that would divulge too much as to its existence. Instead, it gets used to get the suspect to admit what might otherwise be unattainable through a normal interrogation.
Now the scary part:
This could probably directly provide evidence for not just the Boston Marathon case, but many many other criminal cases in this country right now. For all those other cases though, we risk not convicting a criminal, or worse wrongfully convicting innocent people.
It's kind of sad/scary to think that the FBI effectively has a digital oracle that could provide the information to make many trials look like daytime soap operas.
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.
Might makes right.
Protip: If you want actual freedom, you need to gain power. And to gain power, you need to align yourself with the powerful.
The question for you is: Which members of our society are more powerful: the socialist statist that aligns themselves with government? or the gun-owning libertarian that doesn't want to be tread on?
Figuring out who is power, and subsequently aligning yourself with that power, is going to be key to your success. Feel free to argue against that.
That in that case classification is done more or less automatic.
Down to the individual, we may assume.
And yet, they are unable to prevent [insert latest bombing or amok event here].
Clearly a government gone anal.
Only aliens would have the storage technology.
Table-ized A.I.
No one else would post such obvious crap.
It is impossible for the government to record all digital communications because they aren't privy to them. Unless you mean to tell me they have a back door in my open source mail servers which communicate on their own private networks within my organization over physically secure channels.
They don't ever get access to a lot of digital communications so they can not possibly be recording it all.
typical timothy story, so blindly false, yet somehow the moron keeps posting shit.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Pshaw. I've got 26 fault-tolerant terabytes just for my media. Every piece of hardware is available from regular vendors like newegg, amazon, microcenter, etc. It fits in a mid-tower case with room to spare and the capacity could be doubled by switching to 4tb drives.
Google was expected to pass an exabyte of data years ago. Amazon's somewhere around that range with their cloud services. Facebook claims a petabyte of duckface pics and videos. And those are companies that are designed to be making a profit. Government agencies don't have to worry about things like profit.
The question isn't whether it's feasible to store that much data but whether the government is capable of managing the creation of such a data center. They don't have a great record when it comes to IT projects. At least not public-facing ones.
see subject
rewriting history since 2109
I doubt this, not because I believe the goodness of the government as such, but because of the logistical impracticalities it would entail. 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.
You would then have to work with the absolute enormous amount of data in a usable manner which as anyone who has ever worked with very large data sets knows is easier said than done. When you have this much data it's a little more complicated than running a few SQL queries against a given person. The sheer volume of data would make this entirely unusable even if they could pull it altogether.
You would also need personnel from IT types to human resources and so on. This would be one of the largest projects in the country and would have a noticeable impact on unemployment. Physically, where would you put this and get the electricity to run it all? Where would you get all the people with clearances? The logistical realities make this a non-event for domestic communications, it just isn't possible. I'm not even talking about the largest wholesale violation of the Constitution in history if this were true. Sorry, but this doesn't pass the sniff test.
...I think maybe the militia nutjobs are the most sane of the citizens...
and here I thought USA was the country of "freedom and democracy" and was so much better than China??? Was I lied to then????
They do have good off line secret installations. Where security is really important. I went to Ft Huachuca for computer security training and they did a fairly decent job for low level IT staff there. The instructors and some of the other people at that base genuinely knew what they were doing.
DoD care a lot less about every day logistics systems for barracks assignments then they do about keeping under wraps their mission planning or god knows what else, I couldn't get anything out of anyone that mattered.
I'm no longer serving. But you can rest assured there are some in the service that are good at what they do.
He's talking about Carnivore isn't he?
Yay me!
So how do I access my data?
I arranged to meet with Lionel this Friday but I can't remember the name of the bar, and now I lost his cell phone number!
Awesome service by the way, thanks FBI!
Hej! Nasi tu byli!
Could I ask them to restore that email I accidentally deleted last week?
I work for a moderate sized phone company. Customers in the millions. The government has no link into our systems. WE can't even record all of your calls and monitor all your internet traffic. Think about it this way, your ISP likely doesn't even have enough bandwidth to provide you with the speed you're paying for some of the times... Netflix on a friday night for example. Do you really think they have the extra bandwidth to ship all that data off to the government as well? Phone calls are a whole other animal, and are mostly still analog. Duplicating that would involve upgrading the switch... an at least 30yr old piece of obsolete equipment... It just doesn't make sense. Sure, the government could pay for all this stuff... but it would be a HUGE project. Everyone in the company would know. The equipment in our data center is very obvious... we all know what each piece does. There's no mysterious black box in the corner... and there's no way they could be tracking everything without us knowing. There would be at least 1 piece of weird equipment somewhere. I've neither seen nor heard of any such equipment. On top of that, all that data would be meaningless without access to our databases. Capturing the data or phone calls raw would just give you a mac address or phone number. You wouldn't know who was using those numbers. So you'd have to query our database... a database that changes regularly... new systems come online all of the time. So they'd have to have access from outside of the company, so holes in our firewall, make SOAP requests into our system, Have an active user account, make requests to dozens of different DBs, hundreds of Tables, know how all their joins work, know when system changes go in, and on and on... No such thing could happen without the entire company knowing about it. It's just not possible.
Exactly. If as the article claims, the government is archiving EVERYTHING then they are archiving all those duckfaces on Facebook, all your Amazon browsing, all your Netflix instant streaming, all your Box, Skydrive and iTunes syncs and every Skype video conversation. The Government would need Google + Amazon cloud + Facebook + Netflix + whatever else and it would have to grow it constantly, unless they had some nice de-duplication or filtering system which would then break the integrity of saving everything.
There's no NDA that requires the FBI lie about what the NSA is up to. Just because they got immunity in 2007 doesn't mean they were granted the right to mass surveillance, its still a crime even if the punishment is gone.
You should read the article, and also read up on the massive data centers they've been building. If you're building a data center bigger than Facebook+Google's combined, then you're not doing targeted surveillance.
"Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications."
"It would also help explain the revelations of former NSA official William Binney, who resigned from the agency in protest over its systemic spying on the domestic communications of US citizens, that the US government has "assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens" (which counts only communications transactions and not financial and other transactions), and that "the data that's being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can target anyone they want."
"Despite the extreme secrecy behind which these surveillance programs operate, there have been periodic reports of serious abuse. Two Democratic Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have been warning for years that Americans would be "stunned" to learn what the US government is doing in terms of secret surveillance."
....are they learning how pointless their job is? For certainly the mass majority of the population are of people just living their lives and should not be expense'd by the few looking for trouble.
Sorry but he is bold faced blatently lying. There is now way that my digital comms channel between offices is "recorded" it's on a private point to point T1 circuits. Let alone the sheer volume of data. One of my clients is on the Internet II backbone and they transfer 22TB of data every hour. So where is the US government getting all the storage for even the content flying about from university to university which is a drop in the bocket compared to what the Public Internet is sending all over right now per hour. You are telling me the Govt has a copy of the video I shot with my AR drone this afternoon? Where was the black van that was intercepting the signal?
It's a guy that doesn't know jack spewing made up crap to justify his new pundit job at CNN.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
On the internet, 640 terabytes of data is transferred every minute. That means in a year, you have 330 exabytes of data. Not only that, you need the infrastructure to transfer it. You can deduplicate and stuff, but even deduplicating that much data is not exactly an afternoon hack.
Think of that: you're adding 640 terabytes to your database every minute.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Round the living population up to 8 Billion. At one bit per person, not including lookup tables and such, it seems to me that it would amount to about one billion bytes or about one GB. Just a bit more than a few floppies...
Ever notice that Cobra Commander sounds an awful lot like Star scream?
There was a Frontline a while back about this: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/view/.
The EFF notes similar here: https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying
Neither stated that the government is recording _everything_, though.
As I recall from the Frontline documentary, the NSA argues that sweeping up and recording emails and conversations does not require a warrant if they do not actually read or listen to the recorded information. They say they would need a warrant for wire tapping if they want to open up a record and examine it.
why he's a former FBI agent. Somebody finally realized he's full of crap an a liability.
Historically, whatever tech is in the public view, there's usually much more advanced stuff that's classified. Considering the U.S. government has been pounding the anti-terrorism drums for a dozen years now, it's not beyond reason to think they've developed some incredible stuff we have no clue about. Years ago, they already had a lot of this capability. There's also Duqu/Stuxnet, which the public only found out about after it was active for a few years. So I'm sure they've found enough storage space, perhaps even using companies like Facebook & Google to help them keep it. The real question is, what's their reaction time? How quickly is the gov't capable of responding to what's being said digitally. There's a ton of data every day, but it doesn't matter if you can cache it all if it'd still take you a couple days to detect what you need/want to find in it and react to it.
They should treat it as a free cloud backup service, and offer everybody back their old communications when requested.
After all of that, you would need to consider a method of cataloging and indexing all of that data, and a way to search and recall all of it in a reasonable amount of time. Were we in the age of quantum computing, I could see all of this as being possible, but with today's technology it would be a practical impossibility.
And in the end, all you have to do is convince people it's possible that you have evidence you can't reveal in court for national security reasons, and everyone will bend over backwards to do your bidding.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The only time we record anything is when there is an official Calea request. Otherwise, standard POTS telephone calls are unmonitored (at least as far as local/local calls are concerned).
Yay for rush transcripts and for the Guardian forwarding it on without verifying who said what. The CNN transcript got most of the words that were spoken, but misattributed them. The line in the summary was actually Geragos, not Clemente, although Clemente was nodding his head in agreement as he spoke. Here's a crappy YouTube clip.
A corrected version:
BURNETT: And Tim, is there any way, you know, obviously, there's a voice mail they could try to get the phone companies to give that out at this point. But if it's not a voice mail, it's just a conversation, there's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?
CLEMENTE (former FBI counter-terrorism expert): No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her.
BURNETT: So somewhere it's being digitized--
CLEMENTE: --So we can certainly can find that out.
BURNETT: -- or they can actually get that? They were -- people were saying, look, that would be impossible -- that's pretty incredible, what you're saying.
MARK GERAGOS (criminal defense attorney, author of "Mistrial"): No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak, whether we know it or like it or not. [Clemente nodding his head]
BURNETT: Note to self, as Deb Feyerick just said, yes. All right, thanks very much to both of you. Obviously, that right there is a very significant thing, because people have been saying if there's a conversation, if it wasn't a voicemail, they don't know. If they can find out, that could obviously become crucial.
Have gnu, will travel.
it is perfectly reasonable for hundreds of people to know about something and keep their mouths shut, because if they say anything they could face decades in prison.
if you read James Bamford's books, you will begin to realize that most of the major US computer companies, from Cray to IBM, were propped up directly and secretly by the NSA to build supercomputers for it, secretly, years before the technology would reach the public.
of currently known, publically acknowledge information technology. They have actually been secretly behind the development of most supercomputers in the 20th century.
read James Bamford's books. they probably have a backend super-fiber into iCloud, amazon, google, etc etc etc.
i know that you work some place and thats impressive but there are just mounds of evidence that prove you are wrong. and several other comment threads above with the same idea.
"i work for a telco, there is no way this is possible"
"ok thats great, except for several well known court cases that prove the exact opposite of what you are saying"
and a few other cases essentially prove youa re wrong.
there is a mysterious government fiber out port. and a mysterious government room where the fiber goes. there are many of them.
you have no way of knowing what configuration they are using.
please read jim bamford's books.
they dont need to actually have it. thats the nice thing about being the government. you just print more money.
now, some worry warts will point out that eventually this practice will devalue your currency and collapse your economy through hyperinflation, as has happened in several countries over the past 5000 years of civilization, repeatedly.
but hey. we are the USA. we are immune from the natural laws of stuff.
Meh I wouldn't believe that anyone that knew what they were doing would build something so obvious and large in one place that needed to be hidden. There's lots of little stations for different tasks spread all over the country. They are manned by small units that don't inter-operate or know what each others missions are. Thats as much as I know.
So what did the Boston bomber say to his wife when he called her? They would be looking at their humongous HDD instead of following the terrorist's wife, or is the HDD corrupt? Well Clemente claims, and we exclaim.
... random number exchanges with my friends?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
No, re-read his comments. He only mentions that they are recording all voice traffic, not all data. He goes on to say that all digital communications is insecure, but not that they're actively recording all data traffic.
Voice comms is very low in bitrate, and it hasn't scaled up exponentially like general internet traffic, so I have no doubt that the technical capability to do what he says exists. Whether they are actually doing it is a separate question.
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
It is not possible to record a communication that does not pass by the router that you tap. It is hard to record the same if different packets are sent to ten different routers and take different paths to destination. It is not feasible to decrypt a communication that is secured with AES and a new OTP as a key for each block. It is not practical to detect a communication that is done in the zeroth bit of a large photo of a rose bush and posted on Flickr. There are other examples of communication that cannot be recorded or made accessible to anyone but the parties that communicate. Whoever is telling this tale, he is just trying to scare the proles into believing that watchers are omnipresent and omniscient. A new god, by the looks of it. Kneel before me, worms, NOW!
Oh you're just silly. We just number people the right way and it'll fit on a post-it. One readable without any magnification except what's in your eye. Suppose there are X evil people, and Y not evil people. We number everyone evil between 0 and X-1, and everyone not evil between X and X+Y-1. Problem solved. You only need to write down the value of X. No need to store any bits. The first X bits would be 0, the next Y bits would be 1. Easy-peasy.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Perhaps, but It wouldn't necessarily need to capture every single bit of data being transferred. The titles of the movies you stream from Netflix could be collected, but the stream itself ignored. Ditto for the eBook you bought, the MP3 album you downloaded, the game you pirated, etc. Or put another way: The only time your personally created video of your cat is collected by the feds is when you upload it to your site, YouTube, Facebook or whatever. Every time that it's liked, re-tweeted, emailed, hotlinked, or otherwise used elsewhere, It's more or less recorded as "At [TIME/DATE], mianne viewed phantomfive's cat video obtained at prior {TIME/DATE]." I have no way of knowing how much bandwidth/storage that would entail, but I would guess it'd be a much more modest scale from nnn MBs/min to nn GBs/min.
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... is absolutely possible. That is what the company I work for has been doing for a while now. For commercial entities we market it as social network sentiment analysis.
The technology can tell you immediately how your brand is trending, analyzing twitter feeds, facebook, blogs, web searches etc.
It scales nicely. And yes, we have a very large footprint in DC.
This was actually part of why I left the US. As a consultant it seemed security clearance was becoming more and more important. Not the line of work I was interested in.
640 terabytes of data is transferred every minute.
And how much if you only record each youtube video once? . And log only meta information about vpn/ssl/https traffic. (source / dest / time...) And just ignore netflix, hulu, itunes, and the top 10,000 hollywood torrents...
is this the same government thats using reel to reel tape on 16 bit IBM mainframes running COBOL?
Tennessee is still advertising for AS/400 operators, California is still hiring cobol programmers, you fucks cant swap out the punch cards fast enough to store it all
Let me point out that slashdot links to news from the web and there is not that much original journalism on this site. You are seeing a decline in the fishing grounds, not necessarily a decline of the fishermans ability to fish. Its been happening for awhile.
-your friendly neighborhood shill-o-matic
I don't know, but if you think of it, you're going to need something like the total storage space of everyone else on the internet.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Let me see if I understand this.
If I pick up my phone in Clito, Georgia and call my uncle, it will be recorded because the FBI has installed a splitter in the Bulloch County Rural Telephone Coop local office? And where, exactly, do they tap my 56K modem signal when I'm downloading gif's from the bulletin board that uncle Harvey has setup?
Every time that it's liked, re-tweeted, emailed, hotlinked, or otherwise used elsewhere, It's more or less recorded as "At [TIME/DATE], mianne viewed phantomfive's cat video obtained at prior {TIME/DATE]."
That's not possible without deep packet inspection to know the context of the data transfer(s)
For example, if I upload a picture to my personal website using SFTP, there is no way to even know what the data is without inspecting and decrypting the packets. Even if you figured that out, once the file is on that server, I (or the server itself) might move or rename it, so any future retrievals with HTTP would pull a different filename. That's a trivial example, but it basically shows that matching "upload" with "download" isn't really possible.
Facebook, etc., would be just as much of a problem, as the system would have to track the upload and figure out what Facebook ended up calling the picture, since you can upload pictures with the same filename and have them show up as separate pictures.
And how much if you only record each youtube video once? . And log only meta information about vpn/ssl/https traffic. (source / dest / time...) And just ignore netflix, hulu, itunes, and the top 10,000 hollywood torrents...
Thank you for giving me great ideas on how to safely communicate with my terrorist buddies.
Kidding about the "my terrorist buddies", but the point is that you can't discount any data transfer as having the information that you need to stop/solve a crime.
Mod parent up.
The real transrcipt makes a lot more sense....
But much of that is streaming video from a few sources; that's easy to recognize and eliminate as containing no interesting data.
No, re-read his comments. He only mentions that they are recording all voice traffic, not all data. He goes on to say that all digital communications is insecure, but not that they're actively recording all data traffic.
Voice comms is very low in bitrate, and it hasn't scaled up exponentially like general internet traffic, so I have no doubt that the technical capability to do what he says exists. Whether they are actually doing it is a separate question.
-->"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. --
what is that, if not claiming that your wow chat gets recorded by them?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Someone correct me. It just doesn't seem feasible.
Speech recognition is pretty good these days, and text is highly compressible. If they discard the audio, It would be quite feasible to store a transcript of every call.
Why do moronic moderators keep modding up idiotic statements such as these from people who think absence of evidence is evidence of absence? Who ARE those guys, here "Charliemopps", that they think they should have known everything? Since when is THEIR cooperation and knowledge necessary? Even if they knew all that was going on everywhere in their OWN company (which not even the CEO does), that company is not connected to others, right?
This comment is STUPID STUPID STUPID.
Sorry, I've had enough after reading through them and now can't help it. I'm not all that mad at Mr "Charliemopps", everyone is entitled to say something very stupid at least once every hour, but that a number of random people who happen to be mods today find this garbage "informative"...
But cell phones typically use only 8Kbps "on air". This means that a factor 8 compression of "uncompressed" 64Kbps is feasible and that's probably what they achieve, maybe even more, if they wanted to record it all.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
In telco land, they count each connection, even to an answering service, at least one minute. Actual talk time is much less than those 459 minutes. It's probably less than 2 hours. Any silence during those calls is not recorded, you probably have less than 60 minutes per month to record and that is per two telephones, since there's nothing to record if there aren't two telephones connected to each other.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
The US has been recording everything for decades already. A few days after the KAL 007 plane was downed, the USA released transcripts of the voice comms between the fighter pilots. Nuf sed.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Just do like the LHC does. filter things at multiple levels, and this is doable for telephones.
You don't really need *all* the data.
Data coming from public terminals might be important, data coming from common houses might be less important as people are afraid of being found out..
Or watch for call-loops. A circle of calls where A calls B, then B calls C and C calls A might be suspicious. bonus points for watched numbers.
Or a series of quick calls from someone, or a chain of quick calls...
filter out calls between families, or between companies... depends on what you're searching..
Or just keep all the data for a week, and if no one collects it, and the algorithms do not signal anything, then discard the old one to make space..
There are a lot of possible ways to analyze all our voice/text data..
If we talk about Internet traffic, then you could optimize thing a little, for example discard content from youtube, BBC, as they already log everything, keep 4chan... there's a lot more data, but profiling helps a lot.
It's not the same as "everything", but if you ask me, it's damn close... and doable....
just my 0.02$
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know." -- Mark Twain
...If they capture all the transmissions originating from their listening devices and ending at their storage device across the country (on top of storing the transmissions that they intercept.)
And humanity literally requires infinite food. Just not all right now.
I am not a crackpot.
of men, and I can find a way to hang him with them. The objections due to the idea they can't analyze it all mean nothing whatever - that would only be useful for you know, actually catching terrorists etc, which they've shown little competence for. No - the threat here is once you become a "person of interest" for whatever whim - they now have your whole past, and can surely find something on you as an excuse to harass/jail you. All those usually non-enforced discretionary laws now come into play, you know the ones they said we only use to bust those bums from out of town, those other people? Now, it's you.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Except we are talking a scale close to 80,000 PETABYTES. Thats not cheap to store.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
holy shit, the whole internet is rife with stenographic messages disguised as spelling errors! Thanks for validating my schizophrenia!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Not that I know, but the claim doesn't sound 100% solid. Wasn't there news last month that the feds couldn't eavesdrop on iChat converstations (not that I believe them). So, people can still set up encrypted conversations and unless the private keys are not in fact public it wouldn't matter? Then again, Clemente is saying that the traffic is recorded and stored, not necessarily on-the-spot decipherable. Given enough computing power and incentive, I suppose encryption can be broken anyhow.
Anyway, don't have private converstations anywhere anymore I guess.
Even if we had the technology to record every bit that flows across the Internet (Petabytes and Petabytes of data)... and a way to catalog and index it... and the storage to save it for a very long time... there is the human factor to consider.
The more humans that are involved, the greater the inefficiency, the slower decisions are made, and less gets done. Information is compartmentalized, as information translates to political power, and influence. The kind of organization required to operate a system of this magnitude... only exists in movies, and in the minds of the conspiracy theorist, who has little experience dealing with large organizations.
Look at the Boston Marathon debacle. The inter-agency squabbles were in full play. The only reason we caught the guys at all was due to the vigilance of a few ordinary folks. The billions doled out by DHS to the states and cities produced a lot of fancy paramilitary equipment being driven around, none of it was all that useful. After the event far more resources are being expended spinning the wheel of blame, as everybody tries to cover their asses.
Murphy was an optimist
I'm waiting for Bruce Schneier to weigh in on this. If he confirms it, it must be true. He's worked with the spooks before. On the other hand, if he denies it it must be true. He's worked with the spooks before.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
This is VERY OLD news, why did Slashdot take over 10 years to report this? This actually came to light when the first FBI tap in AT&T's dark room came to light ...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Kidding about the "my terrorist buddies", but the point is that you can't discount any data transfer as having the information that you need to stop/solve a crime.
If you downloaded it from netflix, hulu, itunes, or amazon... how do you plan to embed your communications? You don't control the file, you can't modify it.
Unless you think netflix is a terrorist organization distributing movies with embedded communications. But it wouldn't be too hard for them to rule that out.
Meanwhile, as long as you have the hashes for the files, you don't even need to store the file. You can validate netflix sent party X a copy of Joe Dirt... so why bother permantly saving a copy?
Whether or not they are ACTUALLY storing everything is rather moot, since you can't tell when they are and when they're not. It's safest to assume everything is recorded, and that way you'll never be caught by surprise (nobody expects the FBI inquisition!). It's also prudent to assume that any encryption you are using will be cracked within your lifetime. Not that you shouldn't use it mind you, at the very least it might force them to earn their pay.
But why don't we all see if we can get Congress to raise their budget for hard drives by transmitting terabytes of hard to compress random noise to each other as if it were something important? We can prove they're trying to store it if all of a sudden the budget gets raised in the face of massive mounting debt and the sequester...
Anybody read about the gigantic data center being built in Utah? It is being used to store all electronic communications between embassies and foreign governments, most of them encrypted. The plan is that decryption will occur in a few years and they can decrypt the files and gain insight into the thinking of foreign governments.
That makes a lot more sense (because it will never work as planned. same old same old). By the time we decrypt the files, there will be new governments in place, both here and there. But for now, no one has enough computing power to both store and analyze everything communicated digitally.
If you downloaded it from netflix, hulu, itunes, or amazon... how do you plan to embed your communications?
My sleeper agent who was specifically trained to get a job at one of those places (although Facebook would be the best) will do the embedding. If I was organizing any sort of wide-ranging criminal activity like terrorism, getting somebody inside one of those big companies would be one of my bigges priorities, as it would allow covert communications with almost no chance of detection.
Meanwhile, as long as you have the hashes for the files, you don't even need to store the file. You can validate netflix sent party X a copy of Joe Dirt... so why bother permantly saving a copy?
Doesn't Netflix vary the quality based on the bandwidth? If so, there is no fixed hash. In addition, you now have to deal with some sort of live database that sums up the packets from Netflix to the destination, but only those packets that are the movie (no control packets), and keeps the running checksum/hash. Without deep packet inspection, this isn't possible.
My sleeper agent who was specifically trained to get a job at one of those places (although Facebook would be the best) will do the embedding.
If I was organizing any sort of wide-ranging criminal activity like terrorism, getting somebody inside one of those big companies would be one of my bigges priorities, as it would allow covert communications with almost no chance of detection.
How many employees do you think can just go in and modify the live content files at netflix, propogate the changes out all the ISPs where the data is locally hosted, etc.
And getting a sleeper agent who can do that is going to be your top priority? Good god what on earth for? What on earth are you going to distribute via sleeper modified netflix movies that wouldn't be just as easy to distribute any of a hundred other much simpler ways? You'd have to activate the sleeper so theirs risk of being tapped at that point if they are watching you. And you'd have to have some way of messaging the troops to download a particular movie to get the embedded instructions.
What does that really get you that some guy posting cat videos on youtube doesn't?
So does using SSL from a wifi hotspot.
Doesn't Netflix vary the quality based on the bandwidth? If so, there is no fixed hash. In addition, you now have to deal with some sort of live database that sums up the packets from Netflix to the destination, but only those packets that are the movie (no control packets), and keeps the running checksum/hash. Without deep packet inspection, this isn't possible.
Fair enough, they could have the interception/filter/logging mechanism right in front of the netflix servers. Makes things simpler. And netflix is a big enough data flow they could eliminate a lot of traffic by handling it directly at the source.
..that they're recording or analyzing my wife's conversations over video phone in ASL. If they want to record when I order a pizza over the phone, they're welcome to it.
You'd have to activate the sleeper so theirs risk of being tapped at that point if they are watching you. And you'd have to have some way of messaging the troops to download a particular movie to get the embedded instructions.
What does that really get you that some guy posting cat videos on youtube doesn't?
That's why Facebook would be the best, but Amazon or eBay would also pretty good.
For Facebook, you could add steganography to photos of any account that allows "open" followers (i.e., not an individual). For Amazon or eBay, you could do the same to the user-provided item photos. The fact that the photo isn't the same as the original isn't suspicious as these companies already alter the photos in various ways.
The reason for a system like this instead of posting to YouTube, 4chan, etc., is that the poster could be under suspicion, and thus everything they do would be watched. Posting from inside is harder to track by outside authorities. In addition, you could alter enough photos with the same message that no two recipients would need to look at the same Facebook page, Amazon item, or eBay auction. That means that even if the recipients are under suspicion, their actions couldn't be correlated.
It also allows easy innocent explanations, like somebody looking for messages in photos of concert T-shirts on eBay could actually be buying and wearing a few of the shirts, and that cover could go back several years. A extra advantage to this would be that the completely innocent sender of the T-shirt might come under suspicion if the recipient was deemed suspicious. This isn't the sort of planning you would do for something one-off, but rather for a concerted, long-term effort. This is the kind of cover that agents built over many years during the Cold War.
Oh well, 9/11 was the Reichstagbrand of the Fascist States of America.
The only thing I wonder about is that there aren't half a dozen uprisings and civil war going on, with a dozen domestic terrorist attacks every day -- with the express goal of liberating you from your fascist regime. Instead all you've got is some lone madmen and a few FBI fabricated "foreign" terrorists. Must be working well, then.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
you have the internet!!!!!
of course the question is, why do you need to reply to me on slashdot?