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No Upper Bound On Phone Record Collection, Says NSA
PCWorld reports that "[A] U.S. surveillance court has given the National Security Agency no limit on the number of U.S. telephone records it collects in the name of fighting terrorism, the NSA director said Thursday. The NSA intends to collect all U.S. telephone records and put them in a searchable 'lock box' in the interest of national security, General Keith Alexander, the NSA's director, told U.S. senators."
But don't worry; it's just metadata, until it isn't. (Your row in the NSA database may already be getting cozy in its nice new home in Utah.)
He wants all information about everybody he can get his hands on. That's basically his job.
That's why it's the President's job is to say "That's illegal. Don't do it. If you do it, I will have you fired, arrested for wiretapping, and charged for your crimes. I will do that to the next NSA Director who breaks the law. And the next. For as many as it takes, until I get an NSA Director who understands that the law supercedes what they want.", and follow through on what he said.
President Obama has failed to do this. So did President Bush. That's because they don't want to do their job, they'd rather (for whatever reason) have an NSA breaking the law.
I am officially gone from
They already collect it, but it is not in the lock box yet. Currently they are in Israel and god knows where else. But don't worry, they are planning that there will be a lock box.
Ah, I see. Well, then, please allow me to translate what the NSA is really trying to say here.
Uh, we kinda had our previous "lock" box hacked, and all of the records were stolen. But don't worry about Congress getting pissed when we declassify that, it's just metadata. We're cool. We're simply going to make an announcement that we need another 30 billion dollars this year and every year to build a new "lock" box...that will be hacked from the inside next time, not the outside.
Far fetched? We're here talking about NSAs new perpetual data collector, probably titled something arrogant like Project Sheeple...going where no tax dollars have gone before, all in the name of Terrorism. We promise.
Yea... no.
The Democrats may have willingly and knowingly continued the program, but it was started by republicans.
the bad guys won.
That's who was playing!
Perhaps some enterprising jounalist, or the EFF could make some FOIA requests for phone records from the NSA, Whitehouse, etc.. Let the government say that the data is private!
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Another naive new hire..."but I'm pretty sure I'd have heard about it." About like the last time you were about to laid off, "and you had heard about it" directly from the CEO?. Mr. 1157495.
Here's an FYI for you newbie. Technology is controlled by hardware. Without hardware your DBA skills are useless. It has always been that way and will always be. In other words hardware does not have to communicate with the software side to tell you what it is doing. It can skip layers on a whim if that is what it's designed to do. That's a fact. OSI model 101.
The fact is no company gives system wide access to "a DBA". The whole idea that "it doesn't get logged", "it's not recorded" is naive. As a security specialist it was my job to make sure people like you, who I worked along side, knew nothing of what was actually be logged and tracked, and that was just in my company. Just because it's not in the your database(your world) doesn't mean it's not being tracked, utilized, or sold, etc.
Grow up.