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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.
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.
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
It's also wrong. I worked for a regional non-Bell telco. We didn't capture anything that wasn't ordered by a court order, and even then, only the bare minumum to meet the court order.
Maybe his statement should have instead been "the Bells, Verizon, and TWC capture all and forward it to the government." I've heard rumors of that related to AT&T, but never any confirmation. But to say "all" is simply false. Maybe they keep all they get, but I know for a fact they don't get "all".
Learn to love Alaska
We didn't capture anything that wasn't ordered by a court order, and even then, only the bare minumum to meet the court order.
You didn't need to capture anything. According to him, the government was doing it for you. (Or rather, for them.)
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
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.
Er, you folk all asleep or something? "FBI Confirms 'Magic Lantern' Project Exists. And Carnivore gets renamed DCS1000" quote from 2001.
The only argument still going on is whether to let the local traffic department mine the data and Jail the lot of you. Oh and to admit that they collect the data so that the phone conversation can be played in front of the judge before sentencing.
How naive can you people get? its been bloody obvious for years that "Terrorists" have been caught before they did any harm using their communications. Doing the conventional police work to get a conviction must be a right pain in the proverbial. No wonder every police force on the planet desperately wants this data to be allowed in court.
Remember folks, you've got nothing to feat if you've got nothing to hide from data mining applications. They only have the last ten years worth anyway so whats the problem?
OK I might be exaggerating a bit. but by how much?
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
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.
unless of course the freedoms that you want are verboten by that power..
No one else would post such obvious crap.
eh?
it doesn't matter whether you agree with it, or not. It doesn't matter who posted in on slashdot. The fact remains a former FBI official made this statement, not once, but twice, to CNN. Is it true? who knows, but don't go and blame the messenger.
and here I thought USA was the country of "freedom and democracy" and was so much better than China??? Was I lied to then????
While the FBI might not be the sharpest tool in the shed they have infinite resources thanks to the national security black budget. Granted if you have a private network that doesn't peer with any of the big backbones like AT&T then your a probably safe. Once your voice/data hops onto a major backbone like AT&T your data has been sold to the US Government. There are even allegation that this system is contributing names to the no-fly list through heuristic language analysis of voice traffic. To see if you networks are safe, use the word "bomb" as often as you can and if you aren't added to the no-fly list, your networks are probably safe :)
I think the real solution to the problem is to start generating massive amounts of meaningless data until the spooks run out of storage.
Security and Privacy are an illusion. Welcome to 1984 about three decades late.
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.
On what. I've seen the infrastructure. There were no unexpected splitters in the fiber. No unexplained connections in a router. If they tapped everything already, why did I have a dedicated CALEA box and such? It makes no sense, and is simply false.
Learn to love Alaska
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
Could I ask them to restore that email I accidentally deleted last week?
Seriously, you mean a data center like this can't handle the traffic?
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/
and the 5 million people (as of 2011) with security clearances aren't enough?
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/07/security-clearances-increasing/
and the NSA recruiting at Defcon and math colleges all around the country isn't happening?
http://www.federalnewsradio.com/411/2890348/NSA-hiring-reforms-serve-as-model-for-government
These guys have cash and are all of their activities are shielded under FISA and the National Security Act and State Secrets Privilege.
http://www.aclu.org/national-security/fix-fisa-end-warrantless-wiretapping
It's happening, it is a reality, and it is more than possible. Even with an inside whistle blower, the courts will not limit the power of the government to spy on us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
The only thing we really have going for us is the Catch-22 on the use of the data. If it is every used in a trial, chain of custody and 4th amendment issues likethe exclusionary rule will suppress the evidence since it was obtained without a warrant. The only thing that stands in the way of the NSA and fully implementing 1984 is the 4th amendment.
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.
In 2007 we were using "A single NarusInsight machine can monitor traffic equal to the maximum capacity (10 Gbit/s) of around 39,000 256k DSL lines or 195,000 56k telephone modems. But, in practical terms, since individual internet connections are not continually filled to capacity, the 10 Gbit/s capacity of one NarusInsight installation enables it to monitor the combined traffic of several million broadband users.". The Wikipedia page doesn't seem to have any real updates since 2007. Of course traffic has increased since then, but I doubt they bother to store streaming video of Justin Bieber from YouTube - which is reputedly 98% of all bandwidth consumption apart from pron.
What was the size of the LHC storage by the way? Oh, that's right, in 2010 it was "About 50PB of tape storage, handled by a set of robotic storage hardware. Still, they've been finding that disk storage is working well, and have scaled that up to 20PB worth of storage." http://arstechnica.com/science/2010/08/lhc-computing-grid-pushes-petabytes-of-data-beats-expectations/
However the good news is that in 2011 "Our annual data consumption was estimated at 9.57 zettabytes" on the internet. A difference of 21-15=6 orders of magnitude. http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/07/our-annual-data-consumption-estimated-at-9-57-zettabytes-or-9-57/ So unless NarusInsight can find and throw away a million times more Bieber than your snarky comments on Sub Reddit, "Revolutionary rodents against the government" they don't have that on disk yet, But they could probably record all telephone conversation.
I seem to recall that rumor used to have it that only all calls in and out of the USA were monitored, it would not be at all surprising to find that the capability to monitor all internal calls were available. The only reason it might not be happening is that the transcontinental calls route through a finite set of fiber or satellite links, whereas call data on the internet in the USA could route through a very much higher set of nodes that would need to be monitored to capture the data.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
We can't 'know' this is false, but . . . we can look at what the implications would be if this were true.
This would require vast storage, incredible database crossreferencing, would imply certain kinds of information be available not only without warrants, but without ever needing to pull the original data. Not only would warrants be redundant, so would National Security Letters.
All without a single patriot in the government going public and blowing the lid off this, yet simultaneously putting this information in the hands of someone willing to shoot their mouth off on CNN.
Can, in theory, all this be true? Sure. It could happen. *Practically* can all this be true? No - too many conspirators have to work invisibly, never tipping their hands, never making a mistake. Just don't buy it.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
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?
> 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.
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"
From what I've read, the legal argument against this being an illegal search is that the entire dataset isn't searched, it is stored. They store the communications. When they want access to the data on a particular person they get a search warrant to access the stored data. I don't agree with that, but that seems to be the theory.
Here is a short video on an NSA whistleblower about the Utah datacenter and the types of things they can do with that much data.
No. Data taken from warrants and NSLs can be used in court and the FBI can admit they have it and not worry about giving away their capabilities by acting as if they have it. Data taken in a dragnet like this could only be used secretly.
Except that it has been revealed. People just seem to keep forgetting, like they forget the Tuskeegee experiment, like they forget the Gulf of Tonkin "incident", or various other nasty things the government has done.
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.
I don't need a book to know the government funds technology improvements; They freely admit it. It's not exactly super spy secret stuff -- they created the internet. It's a safe bet that they continue to work on similar things.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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."
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?
Any silence during those calls is not recorded
A majority of telephone talk time is women talking, at least a woman. There is NO silence, AT ALL. Though sometimes both ends are talking together.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Actually, it's been my experience that the folks who work on the physical infrastructure usually are the ones who know where the taps are with the best degree of accuracy. They have to, so that they don't inadvertently screw with the link.
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