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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.
They may sift it for key-words, and record who, where, and when, but not necessarily the entire conversation or transaction.
Table-ized A.I.
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
Not that America is perfect, but you have no fucking idea what tyranny is.
tyr-an-ny, n.: (source: dictionary.com)
1. arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power; despotic abuse of authority.
"All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."
2. oppressive or unjustly severe government on the part of any ruler.
"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.'"
3.undue severity or harshness.
"'No, welcome to America."
Would you care to revise your statement, Mr. Internet Pundit?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
You're unaware that the NSA has a room in every major telco hub then? And that the techs aren't allowed to even look crossways at it or what they're hooked into, even for network diagnostic purposes? Huh.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
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
"'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.
Probably. He is trying to make a name for himself as a consultant.
He worked in the FBI's counter-terrorism division. I don't think he needs to "make a name" for himself. His resume already says enough.
If his claim was true, hundreds of people would know about it, and all of them would know they were breaking the law.
And as we know, government officials never break the law. Glad we cleared that one up.
but many of them would be in telecom companies, that would have no reason to cooperate,
They have guns. Lots of guns. Feeling lucky, punk?
). Of course, no amount of logic or absence of evidence this will stop the conspiracy theories (see below).
"Conspiracy theories by a former official in a credible position to know these things." FTFY.
Of course, if it actually was true, the FBI would probably hire shills to go on Slashdot and spread disinformation, and try to convince everyone that there was no vast conspiracy, so why should you trust me?
Why would the FBI give two shits about a geek news site? And why would they need to convince you, me, or anyone else, there wasn't a "vast conspiracy"? You're making a straw man here. A big one.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Could I ask them to restore that email I accidentally deleted last week?
There was a nice joke about the "inconspicuous" nature of Stasi surveillance:
Q: How can you tell when the Stasi has bugged your apartment?
A: You find an unexplained large cabinet in the apartment, and on the street a trailer with a diesel generator has parked...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
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.
"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?)
If memory serves, the STASI eventually had about 1/3 of the population involved in informing on someone or something and never came close to be able to analyze all the data they got.
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.
By this logic we should also believe Bob Lazar about alien technologies. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and the word of one insider means squat.
His "extraordinary" claim is that the government is doing what Google has already done: Indexing the entire internet, with the only difference being one of scale. I think if a private company started by a few college kids can do that, a government with nearly a trillion dollars in operating budget can come up with something.
So your argument is that they will cooperate or be shot? This isn't even a sane way for a conspiracy to operate.
Correct. But then, it's not a conspiracy. He's suggesting a corporation wouldn't cooperate with law enforcement requests. That's patently absurd; Corporations have little to gain and loads to lose if they decide to go against the government. Multi-billion dollar corporations aren't known for behaving like belligerant teenagers.
The point is that the scale of the conspiracy necessary to pull this off is vast enough to make this extremely unlikely.
Except it isn't a conspiracy; we're talking about a national 'darknet' that taps key points in the internet and then mirrors that data to a processing facility before being stored in a relational database. It's not a conspiracy, numerous government officials have already gone on the record as saying this technology exists, today, now. It's not classified. It's not a secret. They've come right out and said this capability exists.
LOL
A former agent for the counter-terrorism branch of our largest federal law enforcement agency talking about the technology used in counter-terrorism is about as credible as it gets, dude. LOL all you want, but your own cred is the only thing the rest of us are laughing at: You're an internet pundit.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
If he wasn't lying, he would be arrested for violation of his LIFE LONG NDA you sign when you take a job with the The FBI.
That's such a load of bullshit I'm surprised I'm the first to call you out on it. The overwhelming majority of the FBI's records are public; they're called court cases. And yes, the agents can discuss them. The agents can even discuss the methods that they use. The only thing agents can't discuss is material related to an active or ongoing investigation, or material that has been classified. There no evidence that either condition has been met here.
People should remember just how terrible Americans are at keeping a secret.
Yup. Everybody knows how to build nuclear weapons, stealth bombers, ICBMs, because we're terrible at keeping secrets. So, tell me, what's the maximum listing angle that any of our nuclear submarines can operate at before they automatically shut down? You don't know? Okay, how about this one: When is the next high-energy test of the HARRP? Don't know that one either? Umm, how about a real easy one: Who's the pilot of Air Force One? Ah, didn't think so.
Someone would have leaked this long ago, just as the secret room at the AT&T switch center was leaked within a couple months.
Yeah, it's a super duper big secret that the government can tap phones and digital lines. Dude, you make this leak sound like it was some kind of blow to our nation's intelligence operations, rather than having all the relevance of knowing the President ordered his latte with skim milk this morning. It wasn't a secret; It just wasn't advertised. There's a big difference. You won't find our nuclear missile silos in North Dakota on google map with the words "Secret Nuclear Missile Silos Here" underneath; But that doesn't mean they aren't there, nor does it mean that there's extra-special effort being taken to keep them secret. They just aren't advertised -- everyone knows they're there.
It wouldn't come from a lowly guy hyping a book.
Yes, a "lowly" agent of our largest law enforcement agency, discussing something that he did professionally for many years, and the tools he used to do that job should be trusted less than random internet pundit "leaking" the same information.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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.
Dear girlintraining,
We're in ur USB keyboard driver
Recordin all ur passwerds
- lolMIBs
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.