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NSA Can Retrieve, Replay All Phone Calls From a Country From the Past 30 Days
An anonymous reader sends this news from the Washington Post:
"The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording '100 percent' of a foreign country's telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden. ... The voice interception program, called MYSTIC, began in 2009. Its RETRO tool, short for “retrospective retrieval,” and related projects reached full capacity against the first target nation in 2011. Planning documents two years later anticipated similar operations elsewhere."
So do they have the cooperation of the target country? Or have the infiltrated the entire communications infrastructure of the world? This is really creepy.
Think again.
Well this is a truly shocking revelation noone saw coming.
NSA will probably claim they only use their power to create rainbows and heal sick puppies.
And all it took was five guys and a pickup truck to accomplish it.
Dude, it's a scare tactic, that chump on youtube is doing a typical interrogation scare tactic which really indicates the FBI doesn't know shit. If the contents "will be known" then why are you asking her? Why don't you just go get it from the NSA? The police always pull that shit. Just confess now and we'll go easy on you, we already know you did it, so why don't you just tell us what happened...no. Fuck you, pig.
Either the NSA is grossly incompetent (surprisingly likely) or this is deliberate counter-intelligence.
Are we really supposed to believe that 13 years after 9/11 that the US doesn't know the location of every airborne plane in the world? Would it really be that hard compared to some of the supposed capabilities of the NSA we've been hearing about lately. The plane crashed, everyone is dead, the NSA has no incentive to help locate the wreckage as that will simply give away the secret capability. Lose a plane in the Atlantic Ocean bound for the United States and watch how fast it turns up.
The unstated assumption is that only the things you find after you get the search warrant are admissible. The assumption was unstated because time machines didn't exist.
If you bury the body and bleach the walls, the prosecution finds no blood. (The cops can find a dozen empty containers of bleach, and ask you why all your wallpaper is sparkling white, and that's still a pretty good foundation on which to build a case. Reasonable people don't bleach their ceilings with a mop.) You can wiretap the guy, but if he's already made the incriminating phone call to his very good friend with the pig farm, it's not going to help the prosecution very much unless the suspect is dumb enough to do it again. Hey, guess what? Law enforcement isn't supposed to be easy.
We now have the ability to quite literally go back in time and look at everything someone ever said, preceding the time at which the warrant was issued.
Legally, there's no time machine, you're just looking at the (nonpublic) permanent record of everything everybody ever said to anybody ever. But qualitatively, being able to go into the past and drag things up, even from private communications where both speakers had a reasonable expectation of privacy, appears to fundamentally change the definition of a warrant, of discovery, and so on.
The whole concept of investigation has changed, and it makes the question "Are you now, or have you ever been, a [politically-undesirable / criminal]?" just got a whole lot murkier. I think that's the issue upon which the Supremes may ultimately have to rule.
It's one thing to say "John Spartan, you have been fined one credit for violating the verbal morality statute." It's quite another to say "...for something you uttered on January 23, 1996."
The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act was passed in 1994. Just how much equipment with mandated-by-US-law security holes WAS sold to foreign countries.
You've got to hand it to them. If any team/person/mutant managed to create such a program then IT MUST BE USED.
It's their job. That's actually the defense many use when they are blamed of taking part in atrocities. It was my duty, it was my job. One way to externalize oneself from what's happening, and from the moral and ethical dilemmas. The fact that ones duty is to maintain an undemocratic bureaucratic structure should be proof enough that the system is rotten from inside. The human interaction can be structured in multitude of ways.
Three places on the cover of the presentation it's "Unclassified, For Official Use Only". That really just means it can't get released by a FOIA request. Foreign nationals can see this. It can be bandied about in unsecured areas. If it was classified at one point in time, it was declassified by the NSA.
They aren't "our" spying capabilities. One of the reasons people are upset with the situation is that the NSA is indiscriminate in their targets. American citizens are just as open to attack as foreign citizens. Those spying capabilities belong to an organization accountable to no one with dirt on everyone alive. If their interests happen to align with those of the American People, great. If they don't, too bad for the American People, because it is damn hard to reign an organization with the sweeping level of knowledge now possessed by the NSA.
The NSA is only still associated with the American people in the sense that it funds itself in large part with tax money taken from those Americans.
Um, what? I can assure you this isn't happening on an iPhone, and I'm 99% sure it isn't on Android either. Maybe if you're doing a voice search on either platform, but not otherwise. Plenty of people have completely rooted their phones and can watch all the data in and out.
If they are willing to spend the resources to store thirty days of phone calls, they probably are storing a lot more than thirty days of textual data - text takes up very little space. I imagine every SMS message, email and IM communication they can obtain is kept for a few years.
This is a good chance to plug Retroshare. Go get it. Tell your friends to get it. Annoy the NSA with an IM program even they can't monitor on a large scale.
Are we really supposed to believe that 13 years after 9/11 that the US doesn't know the location of every airborne plane in the world?
Yes. I think we're rather flying headlong into the perfect governmental competency fallacy in this article.
If an aircraft turns off all its identification gear, how do you locate it? Send a few recon planes up to locate it physically? Task a satellite to look? Why should we give a flying fuck about every single flight in the world that doesn't intersect the U.S.? A commercial airliner taking off in e.g. Kazahkstan and headed for Pakistan is never going to have remotely enough fuel to get anywhere near the U.S. even if they wanted to.
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I've wanted backups of my stuff for a long time. Hopefully the NSA can commercialize this and allow us to retrieve our conversations whenever we want. This is way better than the never forgetting GoogleMind or FaceBook! Imagine the possibilities.. when you promised your kid ice-cream for good grades last month, they can look it up and call you out for cheating them!
...all domestic telephone calls will be routed through Great Britain from now on.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
my first reaction was "wow" but I was amazed that *the scope* not the technical ability
from a network engineering perspective, those calls have to go through certain nodes and pathways...
all are potential points of intercept...one concept you missed is **multiple collection methods**...they could do both of what you suggested combined with any of the following other possibilities:
1. Submarines...every "phone call" (this excludes things like google talk to skype) has to go specific routing points on the coast...subs can but a signal analyzer on the seafloor cables
2. Aircraft...esp blimps/drones...and satellites
3. passive collectors...at major routing nodes...again these are on the coastline...you could put a passive, satellite-operated device that sends the data being recorded up to space in real time
Thank you Dave Raggett
- cause they "cannot" from a technical standpoint ? (c'mon... seriously ?)
7 billion people on Earth. Say 10% are on the phone at any given time.
Say 1/8 MB/min with whatever cell phone codec? 128kbps mp3 is around a meg a minute, right? And cell phone codecs are compressed all to hell.
7 billion * 10% * 1/8 * 60 min * 24 hours * 30 days = 3.78 trillion megabytes = 3,520 petabytes.
And that's just storage to keep on hand. Not to mention the bandwidth required to stream 117 petabytes/day to the servers.
"Sir, if we could just have you look at this little blue light right here, we'll explain everything..."
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Aye, the CPU and bandwidth requirements would be non-trivial
I call FUD on the above, surprising there's anything left to call FUD on at this point -.o;
Actually, the usual saying is "I was only following orders" and is usually meant to rationalize behavior of people in organizations that started out somewhat innocuous but descended into immorality. In this case, we found out that an agency that was created from the outset to spy on other countries is currently spying on other countries. Out of all of the horrible things that have been revealed about the NSA, this is the least surprising.
+1 Actually Using Time Travel Relevantly In A Serious Discussion
Cue discussion about Minority Report and Pre-Crime. Hey, both are (supposed to be) deterministic...
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I hear you...you're don't sound like a nutcase **to me**...you go a bit off on a few of your list there but that's not why i'm writing.
It's wrong to say "the US government"
Our government is the best system yet implemented.
The problem is criminality. Even if it goes up to the President (and it surely has...many times...recently) that does not mean that **our system of governmance** is faulty.
Our economic system (hardcore captialism) may surely encourage bribery...but in totalitarian communist countries you find examples of **more** bribery comparitively...or at least equal ammounts
YES...the CIA "dealt crack" in the 80s, research brainwashing, etc etc...and maybe that whole organization has been rotten from the start but it doesn't define **what the good people are trying to do**
According to its stated documents, the US of A could be the *best country in the world*....we have a *long way to go* but our problems arent because of our system...its b/c our **system is infected**
Yes, the "infected system" line could be used for any country's problems...but precisely because the US has so many channels in place for **the people** to do the right thing...because we have the *power to change* means we are held to a higher standard than say, North Korea or Ukraine
We can clean house...we can get rid of the criminals in our governemnt...the sun will still rise, and we will have ****NEW PROBLEMS****....that's progress!
Thank you Dave Raggett
We're so sorry, Uncle Albert,
We're so sorry if we caused you any pain.
We're so sorry Uncle Albert,
But there's no one left at home
And I believe I'm gonna rain.
We're so sorry but we haven't heard a thing all day.
We're so sorry, Uncle Albert.
But if anything should happen well be sure to give a ring.
We're so sorry, Uncle Albert,
But we haven't done a bloody thing all day.
We're so sorry, Uncle Albert,
But the kettles on the boil and we're so easily called away.
Table-ized A.I.
Is really the key idea. From the old cold war NATO access in countries, shared facilities and generations of helpful local staff. Add in the new NATO countries, Asia, South America, Africa - somewhere cheap new communications loops will have a US or US friendly site to tap. :
Nations get cheap deals to replace ageing telco tech thats US price peering friendly and very NSA friendly.
Cooperation of the target country can be one site with the skilled locals thinking its their own govs efforts.
Cooperation of the target a few surrounding nations can be sites with the skilled locals thinking its their own govs efforts.
As long as the NSA can have a site thats physically near some trunk line and political cover from the host nations gov.
http://cryptome.org/2014/03/ns... has the hint
Few staff know, long term, local and other nations get US export grade mil tech as a swap.
Its ECHELON for web 2.0 and the ability to fake a host, break junk standard web encryption and a few other methods.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Are we really supposed to believe that 13 years after 9/11 that the US doesn't know the location of every airborne plane in the world?
Yep, physics is what physics is. Radar doesn't work though ground or water. If the aircraft isn't above the horizon for the radar, you won't see it. There are literally hundreds of thousands of aircraft aloft at any one time in the world. Many of these are over large expanses of water, where radar stations simply don't exist and never will.
Now, I'm not saying we cannot track a target aircraft if we wanted too, but why would the US want to track a commercial aircraft, literally half a world away? Total waste of time and money. If it was inside the radar coverage of the US mainland, we'd know where it was, but over the Indian ocean, it could crash, scatter in to a million pieces and we'd never find a piece of it until they started washing up on shore someplace.
My theory is that they had a fire and turned back towards Lapangan Terbang Sultan Ismail Petra outside of Kota Bharu Malaysia. Then, for some reason, they lost control of the aircraft, likely due to the fire progressing though the electrical systems. Once control was lost, everything stayed pretty much where they where and because commercial aircraft are generally stable they continued to fly in the same general direction until they ran out of fuel. This puts them almost due west of Perth which matches the ACARS "ping" distance fairly well. Debris field should be small as the aircraft will have hit the water at very high speed and be all in one small area. We will be lucky to find this one.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
7 billion people on Earth. Say 10% are on the phone at any given time.
Why would I say that 10% are on the phone at any given time? I would be laughed at for making up an outlandishly liberal number.
Who the fuck is averaging 2.4 hours per day on the phone? maybe someone whose job it is to be on the phone all day... but nobody fucking else. Now you might want to show an exception to this, but it would just be the exception that proves the rule. The rule is that you are so incredibly bad at making things up that you don't even notice when you just claimed that on average, the average person on earth is on the phone 2.4 hour per day. This average includes the billions of people without a phone at all, so really you are saying that the average person that actually owns a cell phone is talking on it for 4 hours a day or whatever.
Here is a tip: If you want to play the "I can calculate that" game, why not while "calculating that" also calculate the numbers you start with, rather than pulling them out of your ass.
"His name was James Damore."
The need or want the cooperation makes fixing local splitting sites at national exchanges easy.
Cleared US staff can move in and out guided in by chosen locals to ensure any upgrades or changes do not halt US data collection.
Infiltrate the communications infrastructure of the world gets tricky due to upgrades, skilled local staff who are not aware of their countries tap points finding sites, rooms and then asking questions.
Much better for the NSA to work with top locals, have them tell all staff that a site is for their own national security, law enfacement and read in a few top staff about all data flowing to the USA.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
why would the US want to track a commercial aircraft, literally half a world away?
For the same reasons the US would want to record all phone calls from a country half a world away from the past 30 days?
At time t = 0, you have a radar blip at position x with velocity v that's broadcasting an ID. At t = 1, you have a radar blip at position x + v * t that's not broadcasting an ID. Gee, I wonder what the ID could be?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Honestly anyone with half a clue has known the NSA has been doing this FOR YEARS.
In fact I saw a great documentary on the subject in 1998
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
( I am actually serious... who in the western world did not already know the NSA had these capabilities? The surprising thing to me would have been if it came out that they DID NOT have them - at which point I would wonder what they were doing with their billions of dollars ).
You are fully protected in the USA. :)
No color of law, amended law, paragraph, subsection, clause, letter, finding, order, secret order, contract, legal sock puppet, amendment or press talking points can legally get around the Fourth Amendment.
Good US legal teams have been working hard on this in open court
http://www.freedomwatchusa.org...
The real fun starts with the next gen technical and legal vision of: 30 days becomes 30 months then 30 years then a lifetime of digital recall before sealed US courts.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
7 billion people on Earth. Say 10% are on the phone at any given time. Say 1/8 MB/min with whatever cell phone codec? 128kbps mp3 is around a meg a minute, right? And cell phone codecs are compressed all to hell.
7 billion * 10% * 1/8 * 60 min * 24 hours * 30 days = 3.78 trillion megabytes = 3,520 petabytes.
And that's just storage to keep on hand. Not to mention the bandwidth required to stream 117 petabytes/day to the servers.
"Sir, if we could just have you look at this little blue light right here, we'll explain everything..."
This reference for a GSM codec states bit rates of 1.6KB/s down to 0.59KB/s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
Additionally the speech is likely to be pre-processed from audio to text for storage. Final data could be as low as tens of bytes a second. One estimate was that the entire telephone speech data of the US could be stored for as little as $30 million a year in hardware costs. For the NSA that's petty cash.
The US did not want to see expensive US equipment mandated-by-US laws been frozen out of international markets with new US only costs. :)
With some effort the US ensured other telcos would upgrade to equipment of a US interception standard as part of the law enforcement laws/letter/understanding/trade deals.
No US telco exporter left behind.
Junk encryption for many telcos, their govs, the US gov, fun for ex staff, other nations spies, criminals with cash from the mid 1990's on
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
NORAD claims to monitor all flying objects around the entire earth, from ground level to 22,000 miles above the surface. They do not disclose however, how they are able to achieve that.
Ex post facto. As far as new laws; unless they ignore the constitution, they can't apply new laws to anything you did before that law as passed. Just hope they have valid timestamps.
Somehow at some point we decided our constitutional limitations only apply to citizens (laying aside present violations) and ignore the "unalienable rights" and how it prohibits government rather than assigns human rights.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Why would they want 30 days of this?
Have gnu, will travel.
One part is that they can go back and look for anything that may sound incriminating and use it. Like the quote: "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
The other, is, how easy is to "plant" evidence that only they have access to?
perhaps with the lost Malaysian flight they know where it is but can't say so they don't reveal the capability. or.. they don't know.
and then the text is searchable, which the audio is not. If someone uses certain keywords then up the priority and keep the raw audio for them.
How much processing is required to do the speech->text? A fair bit i assume, and having heard many calls where i can't understand the other person then speech->text won't work.
We should all file FOIA requests for our last month's conversations.
Hundreds of providers ? I'm not so sure. Building infrastructure is (really) expensive. I wouldn't be surprised if many of them outsource the transports to other companies.
Like DSL in many cities in Canada, a lot of times runs over Bell Canada telephone lines.
New things are always on the horizon
...which makes it not so scary anymore.
I've bleached ceilings with a mop. I may not be a reasonable person, though, merely one that used to live in a damp, moldy house.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
No. If it was illegal when you did it, it doesn't become any less illegal just because nobody found the evidence that caught you until X hours/months/years later. The statute of limitations - if applicable - doesn't make what you did legal, it makes prosecuting you for it illegal. Profound difference.
The actual problem is that all of this surveillance is one-way. The watchers refuse to be watched in turn, and when we take matters into our own hands and catch them elbow-deep in the cookie jar, we are the ones persecuted. That is not acceptable.
why would the US want to track a commercial aircraft, literally half a world away?
For the same reason they would want to track a nuclear-armed ICBM aimed at Washington, DC from anywhere in the world. I'm kinda incredulous they can't do this. If it turns iout they really can't then I'm a bit despondent, too.
Additionally the speech is likely to be pre-processed from audio to text for storage.
I hope not. Consider the difference between "I'd like to plant a balm in your yard" vs. "I'd like to plant a bomb in your yard".
So why don't they start tracking the phone calls that were made from flight MH370?
DSL runs over telephone lines. That's how the technology works..
trust me, Republicans are working on this as hard as they can, but only at the margins (voter ID laws)...and YES we did see Bush II get in via court decision...that is true....
but you're wrong...all your points are wrong, but #4 is the only one that is worth refuting...for posterity
for you to be correct, the US has to have widespread fruadulent elections
it's not true at all
if we vote for people & they win, then they make policies and vote on laws
Thank you Dave Raggett
counter-example? if you don't have one then you don't have a point & should just admit you're wrong
one that doesn't have the flaws you mention...
Thank you Dave Raggett
all decisions can be reduced to "DO or Don't"..."yes or no"...."yeah or nay"...that's why **in every country** there is a majority and minority party
first, the US is not by law or statute a "two party system"....any parties that meet the qualifications can get their candidates on the ballot
2nd, since all decisions can be reduced to a Binary then by logic at the decision point all parties must pick a "yes or no" on a law or policy
3rd, political parties are in other countries that have more than one strong party always ***reduce the policy question*** down to a majority & opposition
your "two party system" rhetoric is about 20 years old...no one currently in politics is pushing the "3rd party will solve our problems" horsepucky anymore
Republicans are **way worse** than Democrats in the USA right now in 2014...they vote in ****total antipathy to each other**** on all kinds of policies...from Abortion to Net Neutrality
I'm sorry this is as much of debate as you're going to get from me...I have seen the "3rd party solves everything" fail over and over & no one really takes it seriously
If you make good points I'll comment, but if you think carefully you'll see you're wrong.
Multiple party systems are in use all over right now & they prove the "binary by necessity" point.
Thank you Dave Raggett
I hate Republicans & their policies!
i was being sarcastic!
Thank you Dave Raggett
Way to miss the point. Bell Canada has a de-facto monopoly on phone lines, especially long distance trunk lines, so effectively all DSL traffic in the entire country, as well as all voice traffic moves via Bell Canada's network. Tap into the Bell backbone(s), and you tap into the entire country.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
is this still a thing? really??
Heh, I had to read that in my head in an American accent before I 'got it' ... to me they sound nothing alike.
But yeah, given how crappy most GSM (or other cell phone) calls sound, I'd be surprised if any text to speech system could do this en masse with enough accuracy to make it useful.
As an American Taxpayer, all this is well and good (well as long as it's not MY country that's being hacked) but...
With all this data/phone calls being intercepted, why hasn't more governments that the U.S. doesn't like been overthrown?
IF they have so totally compromised the infrastructure of foreign nations as to be able to hack even the heads of states e-mail (Sorry Chancellor Merkel!) and intercept and record ALL of a nations telephone conversations they must have dirt on SO MANY PEOPLE.
How many mistresses and Dachas does Putin have? How many billions (and where are they kept) are stashed away by the rulers of China? How does Syria's Assad (and his cronies) coordinate their attacks? How many people are the Egyptian military torturing? Is Thaksin really directing his sister in Thailand? Why is Maduro such an idiot? It would seem to be a simple thing to just publish the information and bring to bear (what's left) of public opinion against these rulers. Sure people would claim that they were faked but there would be enough of a ring of truth (because they're true!) that these accusations would stand. Also remember that even if the U.S. didn't have the dirt on the top dogs, they've probably got enough on close associates (allies, friends, lovers, family) to make things very uncomfortable.
Maybe the NSA/CIA/POTUS hasn't done this because this was meant to be a very last resort weapon since once the cover was blown nobody would trust their electronic devices again (then again it would be very hard to live without telephones!). Well SINCE THE COVER IS NOW BLOWN, I SAY USE IT! (Or at least threaten to use it). Make it known to these rulers that if they don't do X, all their assets/girlfriends/drug habits are going to be exposed to the world. Maybe in a few years they'll have replaced their infrastructure with something they think they can trust (ha ha) but until then let's make the world a better place!
Or maybe the NSA is just drowning in data. (Have you tried listening to an entire countries worth of phone calls?) Carl, I thought you solved this by now!
And just how, pray tell, does the US get access to foreign radar? It's not like THAT info is transmitted over phone lines.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
NORAD claims to monitor all flying objects around the entire earth, from ground level to 22,000 miles above the surface.
[Citation Required], and no, the fact that they can track Santa Claus doesn't count.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
why would the US want to track a commercial aircraft, literally half a world away?
For the same reason they would want to track a nuclear-armed ICBM aimed at Washington, DC from anywhere in the world.
I was unaware that commercial aircraft carried nuclear warheads and could be launched against US targets from anywhere in the world. However, I do know that if that were the case, the US would be one large puddle of nuclear glass by now.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I wonder if they've thought through what all this spying on 'allies' is doing to them, long term.
The change in attitudes towards the US in friendly, allied countries - the UKs and Australias and Canadas and Germanys of the world - has changed noticeably in the last 20 years. We quite liked you guys in the 90s. The US had a positive image and was an popular place to visit. But now you have a whole generation who is really quite anti-American. This shift in attitude started with Iraq (II), particularly in the countries that, due to treaty or otherwise, committed (and lost) troops to that conflict for what was felt to be no good reason. It deepened when you started treating tourists like criminals (taking first two, and then all ten fingerprints of everyone who enters, even just to transit and connect to another flight elsewhere). And now, all this NSA stuff is compounding the situation.
Diplomats and politicians and businessmen won't see much of this shift in attitude. In the circles they roam in (educated, generally middle-aged to older people), nothing much has changed. But there is a ~significant~ anti-American streak, in supposedly allied, Western countries, among younger people (say, the under-25s). It's not (usually) a burning hatred or anything as dramatic as that, more a general feeling of resentment and 'screw those guys'. Not seen as a place to visit as much either - quite a few of my friends 'wouldn't visit me in the US if [I] paid them' (I live in the US currently ... I move around a lot for work). Just seen as too much hassle with the fingerprinting and the scary, rude border officers (though, I personally think that's just an LAX thing ... SFO and DFW seem a lot friendlier!)
Whether this or justified or not is somewhat moot - that generation will eventually occupy the positions of influence and power in politics and business, and attitudes formed in youth are often difficult to change (although, they will generally mellow with age). The US is big and powerful and could reasonably argue its allies need it more than it needs them; nonetheless, they rely on friendly countries in obscure corners of the world for a lot of their ability to project military power (bases) and collect intel (communications installations, listening stations etc.) I just wonder if they've considered what a general shift in attitude towards the US in the rest of the western world would mean, long term...
Exactly, I laughed (out loud) when I read the summary. Why bother wasting the typesetting on the word 'foreign'? Given the revelations to date, let's just assume that everything including recordings of domestic calls going back to 1956 exist someplace. If the feds want our trust back, they need to earn it through transparency.
The other issue with ubiquitous surveillance is that it doesn't even need to be used in court. You discover somebody is a drug dealer or whatever. You arrange to have a cop happen to walk past the house where a deal is going down and hear something suspicious. Busted!
Basically you have to find a chain of evidence that is legal/plausible, but that is certainly possible. The US did that sort of thing in WWII all the time. Find out that a supply ship is at point XYZ from Enigma intercepts, arrange for a recon plane to overfly it, and then the next day blow it up. Generate noise that suggests you have the worlds largest recon fleet, while in reality not needing more than a handful of planes.
The problem with all of this is that warrants used to mean that if you had reasonable suspicion, you could ask nicely, and if you found something that gave you probable cause, you could get a search warrant.
The unstated assumption is that only the things you find after you get the search warrant are admissible. The assumption was unstated because time machines didn't exist.
...
We now have the ability to quite literally go back in time and look at everything someone ever said, preceding the time at which the warrant was issued.
So law enforcement personnel aren't allowed to use security tapes from surveillance cameras, or ISP server logs, or any sort of record keeping? Sorry. We have always had the ability to "go back in time" to retrieve evidence.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Look at the Snowden leaks. One thing is Australia's Telstra giving full access to a north Pacific cable that carries traffic from the US to a lot of Asia in addition to Australia. Add in a few more Telcos and that's 100% of all traffic from a few countries.
A lot of places that deliberately copied and expanded on the US system or even the US several years ago before portions of the system were gamed or removed. Being able to game things by fillibuster (a bullshit tactic direct from Imperial Austria, as written about by Mark Twain when he was reporting from there), refusing to put items to a vote, no consequences for lying to Congress and similar shit kicked in the face of democracy are wrinkles in the system that can be dealt with.
Other things like the really stupid electoral system can be reformed by examples devised in the US and applied when US based staff have run elections in other countries. Why should people have to line up around the block all day on a Tuesday to use machine that the staff only had minutes to learn how to operate before polling started? How can you see idiocy like that and still pretend there is no room for improvement? It doesn't matter if things are better or worse anywhere else - some things are clearly not good enough and can be fixed.
> A good system of governance should transparently expose, prevent, stop, and/or negate criminality.
We're talking about it. It's exposed. We have no fear of talking about. The politicians in Washington are worried that we're talking about it.
Is there any other system that exposes problems to the extent that the US system does? It's damn sure not perfect, obviously. This crap does get exposed and published on the front page, though.
Another important consideration after exposure is ACCEPTANCE (or lack thereof). In many countries, rampant bribery is exposed. Everyone knows about it, and everyone participates. It's accepted as normal. The US wasn't that way. When our leaders were busted, their career was over. Then there was Marion Berry, Ray Nagen, etc. They got caught and then re-elected. That, I think, is a big problem. Exposing this stuff is half of it. The other half is for the electorate to not put up with it.
The other day Obama said he would veto a bill declaring that the president must _obey_the_law. Putting aside minor arguments, his official position is more or less that he doesn't have to follow the law, that he's above the law. Is this nation to be ruled by properly passed laws, or ruled by a personality? Are we going to put up with this?
So says the 9/11 crash into the pentagon was faked guy?
Cities and states screw things up too, of course.
If your city, day Chicago, gets completely infested with dirty politicians for years and they royally score things up, or start tapping your phone, you can get the hell out of Chicago.
You can also directly affect local politics in a way you can't affect Washington so easily. It's much easier to keep on eye on the guy down the street than some guy thousands of miles away in Washington. I even considered running for an office in my county, and I probably would have won. There's no way I'll ever win the presidency. I can damn sure win a seat on the school board, though. Since I can be on the school board, but I can't run the department of education, local control is inherently more democratic.
Really? Without reality getting in the way?
Hey, I've got this bridge I want to sell off. It's really long and too straight to work on a curved earth, but it should be OK on your flat earth where radar can get anywhere.
Yes, yes - I've heard about over the horizon radar but sadly it's not magic and doesn't provide your dream.
Teenagers.
Probably other sources as well given things like spying on an Indonesian clove cigarette manufacturer for US "commercial clients". That much has leaked out but the meaning of "commercial clients" and what the NSA got for providing information to them is not clear as yet. Whether the money is going direct to the NSA or into the pocket of someone giving them orders Charlie Wilson style would be a very interesting thing to work out, especially since such control out of the chain of command could be a very serious threat to US democracy. If the NSA is for sale what is stopping Rupert Murdoch hiring them? He likes to influence elections. How about someone who is not already in deep with Washington? I hate to bring up the cold war ghost but there's a lot of money in Russia and China these days, and if you are already on the take you don't look very carefully to see where the money trail starts from.
That's the old "free will" thing that has been a matter of discussion for at least a couple of thousand years.
See also "no complex plan survives contact with the enemy".
I'm thinking of that quote with the fuss generated over the "sinister" signoff of "good night" on the missing airliner.
In some climates you've got to use something to clean off the mould and bleach works, so thanks for the reminder that it's time to do it again :).
I get your point about unusual actions though.
There is an already existing tool that could handle this: statute of limitations
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
You missed my point?
I am all for decentralised democracy such as the examples used in South America and Europe. I would even settle for people being highly informed and engaged in the political process. This is irrespective of the economic/political ideology - this is not a left/right thing.
I would even go as far to argue that anything other than this is NOT democracy but a farcical approximation of it. Just because a vote is involved every few years does not make it democratic!
Sadly the opposite is true in the US and in my own country of NZ. (although not as bad here since we are smaller and have the MMP system for elections thus smaller parties are viable options)
WTF? Of course not. Both are illegal and wrong, but still, just how did you manage to conflate the issue of warrantless surveillance with the issue of laws applied ex post facto or the issue of tainted evidence?
The GP made the mistake of arguing against illegal surveillance because it could catch illegal activity. I pointed out that was a bad argument, and that the argument should be against illegal surveillance because it is _illegal_.
hahahahaha
Because of course they *delete* them all after a month.
hahahahaha
a country, or any country? That's important here. If they can do it to one country that only means that have one target thoroughly infiltrated. But if they can do it to any country of their choosing, then I'm seriously frightened.
Here's why: Telecommunication is considered vital infrastructure in every country I know. I used to work in the industry. We had some of our phone switches in frigging nuclear-blast-proof bunkers. They and our primary storage system occupied the highest security data center available to us. There's nothing civilian above that.
As a security guy, I can of course imagine a few ways to breach security or hack the switch, i.e. both electronically and physically. But it would require a considerably amount of resources. So if they have done that for everything everywhere, then... wow.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Phone conversations are, from the perspective of the actual callers, in-channel two way communication. If A is talking on the phone to B for ten minutes, then the total phone time for both is twenty minutes, but the actual length of the single phone call is only ten minutes. So, if everyone in the world spends 10% of their time on the phone every day you actually divide that by 2.
Of course, you've already given a very generous compression rate. It's possible that, with good voice recognition, you can turn large parts of that into pure text transcripts, just saving the bits of the conversation that the recognition software isn't confident about, but we'll ignore that. So, we'll just say that your 3,520 petabytes is about right for a month.
A petabyte of storage is going to run you anywhere from about $15,000 for tape to $150,000 for a cheap hard drive solution (a la backblaze) to about $3 million for a solution from EMC. So, we're talking from around $53 million per month to $530 million per month to $11 billion per month.
The cost for the bandwidth would be harder to figure out. Let's say $.05 per gigabyte, although it's quite likely that the NSA can get it a lot cheaper by basically just forcing the telecoms to give it to them and passing the costs on to us as hidden taxes. In any case, the final costs would be something like $4 billion to $132 billion per year with the majority of it being bandwidth costs if the storage is done on the cheap. The budget of the NSA is classified, but is estimated at something like $10 billion per year.
So, the conclusion is that storing the phone communications of everyone in the entire world is entirely doable by the NSA.
Isn't anyone going to ask about the new NSA data center in Utah? It is claimed to have enough storage to save all the world's conversations for 100 years. What could NSA possibly have in mind for that?
Radar coverage isn't magic, and it isn't all encompassing...
Were those surveillance cameras, ISP server logs, or any other sort of record keeping done in blatant violation of the 4th Amendment? Sorry. Relevance fail.
Nice troll, but people with two neurons to rub together know that these patriots actually exposed traitorous behavior inside the NSA. Much of the spying they are doing constitutes a treaty violation. It's the constitution that makes treaties law, so they're violating the constitution. This is why it's so cool to have patriots revealing our spying institutions' malfeasance. We The People are responsible for their crimes, as they work in our names.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
why would the US want to track a commercial aircraft, literally half a world away?
For the same reason they would want to track a nuclear-armed ICBM aimed at Washington, DC from anywhere in the world. I'm kinda incredulous they can't do this. If it turns iout they really can't then I'm a bit despondent, too.
Seriously? You do realize that we cannot track even Russia's ICBM's very well right? Best we can (and do) hope for is to detect a launch by it's IR signature during the boost phase. Ever wonder why submarines are used as missile launch platforms? It's because they are hard to track. Other platforms are ground or ship based which due to their limited numbers so we can follow them by brute force if nothing else. There are just too many commercial aircraft to track this way.
This is not to say we couldn't track a handful of suspicious aircraft if necessary. But a scheduled commercial flight, half a world away, 4 citizens aboard, and with zero chance of reaching the USA proper before running out of fuel is NOT a direct threat. No way we would expend the resources necessary to track this fight. There is little national security interest in the area and I'm betting few assets capable of tracking aircraft stationed near enough to matter. No, we don't have anything more than the Malaysian government has.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Who the fuck is averaging 2.4 hours per day on the phone?
Drivers.
No need to get all rude and cuss me out, dude. It was a very rough estimate. I don't see you stepping up.
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A petabyte of storage is going to run you anywhere from about $15,000 for tape to $150,000 for a cheap hard drive solution
For your average PC user, maybe. Vendors make everything like 100x more expensive.
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Especially Commercial aircraft flying a regularly scheduled routes on international flight plans between commercial airports and carrying paying passengers.
Now if a 777 pops up out of nowhere or leaves a military installation heading for the US main land, that MIGHT be interesting enough to look at. And if it is heading towards US airspace without a verified flight plan, it will be investigated if not intercepted and identified before it gets too close.
In fact this happens from time to time when the Russians test our air defenses. They will fly threatening flight paths with their bombers and observe what we do about it. We usually scramble fighters and go out and ID them visually, perhaps tail them awhile. It doesn't happen every day, but it does happen regularly.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Now instead of knowing where all planes are right at this moment, we're talking about keeping a history of all planes in the air, tracing back...how long?
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I love how my posts get modded down when I put the trolls in a box
Sorry Republicans, "libertarians" and general haters...you're dead in the water
Thank you Dave Raggett
The system includes the first amendment and the diligent journalists it encourages. If the NSA chief had his way, we'd know nothing. A system includes all of the interacting parts.
If the voters interact with the policy making, they are by definition part of the system. If we abdicate our responsibility and don't take any action, we are definitionally not part of the system anymore.
What does the US have to do with anything? The people operating the foreign radar should have received the ID broadcast.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Are you trying to imply that would be a problem? It would just be a list of (plane ID, geographic coordinates, velocity, altitude) tuples updated every minute or so. The records of all flights worldwide in the last 6 months could probably fit on an SD card.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
> people being highly informed and engaged in the political process. This is irrespective of the economic/political ideology - this is not a left/right thing.
That brings up another interesting topic. I'm reminded of Ross Perot taking out 30 minute television spots in which he displayed various graphs trying to educate voters about economics. Contrast that with the left in America "All these people don't have health insurance. We should pass this 1,000 page bill without even reading it because ... Hope and change!"
In the US, it seems to me that in the US, the fight is often between the left saying "wouldn't it be great to give everyone free _____. Let's do it!", followed by the right interjecting "well you see, nothing is really free. To pay for that would cost $XX billion, and the budget forecast ...". From where I sit, it appears that the left does a great job politically selling the headline, the five second pitch for something that sounds great. The conservatives have done a relatively poor job explaining the implications of the proposals, informing voters why "fuck those rich people" isn't actually a solution to anything. Therefore, the evidence suggests that informed voters are precisely what the left doesn't want. Many on the right have tried to educate voters, but the voters are more interested in watching American Idol.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Is automatically recording the data traversing a third party network a violation the 4th, so long as the warrant for searching that data is not based on that data?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I stand by my original point. Until they enter U.S. airspace (and I would hope the entire border has radar or other means of detection for unauthorized entries...if we're already talking paranoid "TRACK EVARYTHING!!1" it seems like a reasonable assumption to make), I don't see why we should care about all other flights. Next you're going to suggest we start tracking all vehicles worldwide because they could drive over a trans-Atlantic pontoon bridge to the U.S.
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To be fair, that article pointed out that they claimed to have the capability to do so. A reasonable person would think that that capability wouldn't be used habitually unless the country was engaging in aggressive posturing or actively supporting terrorism or something. (The key is that chunks of our government *aren't* reasonable.)
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I just re-read the entire thread, and feel I should clarify: my point was not that the US should be able to track the plane, it was that someone (i.e., whichever country handles the airspace the plane is currently flying through) should be able to, and that "but they turned their ID transmitter off mid-flight" was not a reasonable excuse for failure to do so.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You were claiming that the American system was the best ever while the truth is that there are quite a few systems that are at least as good if not better. You just have to look at how the American system has evolved to see that it has serious problems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The things you point out are *human behavior* problems, not inherent to any system.
You're conflating fraud, abuse, and manipulation of the system as inherent flaws, from a cybernetic perspective.
To undrestand the difference, for a specific issue, ask yourself, "Is this caused by part of the structure of the system or could any system have a human who could make this choice?"
The thing that makes a system "better" in this context is its ability to **be corrected**
Like a submarine will sink without effort, so will Democracy. What makes the system better is the ability for people to overcome fraud, abuse, manipulation, etc.
I'm comparing **systems** not **behavior in the system**
So start over...tell me a better **system** and point out specific parts of the system and why they are better than the US system of checks and balances.
Thank you Dave Raggett
That's certainly true. Alot of the old school republican seats did get taken over by the tea party candidates. They also lost the white house after Bush, so there were SOME consequences for the party.
Will the democrats have consequences for putting up Obama and Pelosi? We shall see. They do have the advantage that Bush's last year or two were bad, so Obama's suckage doesn't contrast as much. Had Obama followed Reagan, the sudden drop in effectiveness would have been far more visible.
You took the type to type a response, but couldn't actually provide a specific, testable example...just more rhetoric
If what you say is true if I ***just*** have to ***look*** then YOU should be able to at least give an example, specifically, of your claim.
If it's so blatantly obvious why can't you manage to type it in a post???
counter-example, with specifics & explanation, or STFU...I'm still waiting
Thank you Dave Raggett
So where's the counter-example?
You take the time to type that out but you still can't manage to participate in **constructive discussion**
I made a claim, that the US system had the most 'feedback' mechanisms + therefore was theoretically the "best", and you & others said:
"no you're wrong"
but didn't actually counter my point
You didn't address the notion of "feedback mechanisms" in evaluating gov't systems or my other points
anything you type that is **not** a direct clash with my claim is trolling
that includes a meta-comment on my comment asking for a counter-example
you can't present an example b/c you're just trolling
Thank you Dave Raggett
So your response, which by your own statements should be **blatantly obvious** is this:
> Canada is a better system b/c their local, state, & federal elections are on **different days**
- Too many candidates on one day??? Canadians are idiots if a list of candidates confuses them so that they can't do it all on one day. This is irrelevant and in no way measures up to the evidence you claimed to have. Also, Canada's voter turnout in state/local elections are significantly lower...b/c they're on different days
> "any country with X"
- that's not a specific example...that's half of a specific example...and your "X" criteria are baffling...if the US's 'bill of rights' doesn't pass your test, you **must** identify which one would & what the differences are
Thank you Dave Raggett
Yes, but the very next part of my sentence after you cut it off was "(a la backblaze)". The NSA, having a secret budget may very well be able to get away with rolling its own cheap solution where typical government agencies have to take bids from contractors then ignore the bids and go with the most politcally connected bidder (then pay three times the bid amount)/
Well it's not a hard drive solution if you're using online backup, now, is it? Without enough local hard disk to store it all at once, it's just a storage solution.
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I don't know about the NSA, but if *I* was designing a system to be used to prevent terrorist bombings and such, I would keep copies of all the audio intercepts. I wouldn't trust voice-to-text to reliably translate 100.000% of intercepts. And besides, vocal patterns count for a lot, too.
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No. I'm asking for you to *make a direct clash* so I can continue the discussion.
You're dodging, tolling, and avoiding. I want that to stop.
if there are "a bunch" then why couldn't you link to one???
you read them at least once, why didn't you just copy/paste the most relevant parts?
b/c you can't
b/c you're wrong, and you know it
Thank you Dave Raggett
So your example is "Australia has paper/pencil voting"
that's not a counter to my point about "self correcting systems" at all
it's a random factoid that is irrelevant to the discussion (voter fraud is virtually non-existent in the US as well)
Thank you Dave Raggett
um...HELL YES...WTF have I been saying this whole time???
I judge the US system the best ***precisely because*** from a systemic perspective it has the most feedback channels.
You litterally spat my own argument back at me.
As for Australia's preferential voting system, it's a distinction without a difference in practice at the Federal level. Preferential voting is an *option* I'll allow, but it in no way is the **blatantly obvious** thing that is so clearly better than the US system like you made it out to be.
Fact is, you can't actually provide a counter-example. You can make a few case studies of options but that's not the evidence you claimed you had.
But that said, I *****definitely***** agree that the US has alot of improvement to be done!
Thank you Dave Raggett
haha. God you are funny.
You are not going to bully me into it with school yard tactics dude.
I am not engaging in pointless debate with someone such as you as I have already said. Once that decision is made I don't care what you think.
This discussion is over for me now. Have a nice life.
The backblaze solution is a hard drive solution. The tape solution was the $15,000 per Petabyte solution, the backblaze solution is a hard drive solution costing $150,000 per Petabyte, and the EMC solution is a hard drive solution costing 20 times as much. So, using the backblaze solution brings the cost up to about 8.5 billion a year. Still within the theoretical budget of the NSA. Not to mention that, as I and others have pointed out, speech recognition really is good enough these days that many conversations could be kept immediately available as a text transcript, possibly with short audio snippits of bits the speech recognition had trouble with and the actual full audio could be saved to tape.
Also, I don't think anyone on this thread except you imposed the restraint that the solution had to be immediately available online rather than after a brief delay.
Asking for you to directly engage the topic under discussion is something everyone in the "school yard" would understand, even the Kindergardeners.
You couldn't back up your claims, so you level a few random Ad Homonym attacks & call it done....if that's somehow me "bullying" you then guilty as charged.
Also, I'm done w/ this so I won't be responding to any further posts from you on this topic.
Thank you Dave Raggett
It's not my claim or dream, it's NORADs. You are free to believe them, or not, but I don't think that their only means of object detection is ground radar.
The backblaze solution is a hard drive solution. The tape solution was the $15,000 per Petabyte solution, the backblaze solution is a hard drive solution costing $150,000 per Petabyte
Isn't Backblaze paying somebody else to backup your data in The Cloud? They could use an army of trained gerbils to store my data for all I care, as long as it has comparable bandwidth and integrity, etc. I don't call it a hard drive solution unless I have a disk farm under my control. Maybe my terminology is wrong, though.
So, using the backblaze solution brings the cost up to about 8.5 billion a year. Still within the theoretical budget of the NSA.
Yeah, I'll concede that now.
Not to mention that, as I and others have pointed out, speech recognition really is good enough these days that many conversations could be kept immediately available as a text transcript, possibly with short audio snippits of bits the speech recognition had trouble with and the actual full audio could be saved to tape.
You lose a lot of inflection and verbal cues in the transcription, though. When we're talking national security and a giant budget, why skimp?
Also, I don't think anyone on this thread except you imposed the restraint that the solution had to be immediately available online rather than after a brief delay.
I don't think I did either...by my math I just implied that the data had to be available sometime the same day (or within 24 hours, I guess) to get the bandwidth figure. Of course, the longer it takes to be available, the less valuable the system is for dealing with threats happening Right Now.
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They talk about it in detail on the TLC show, Super Structures, when they do the episode on Cheyenne Mountain/NORAD.
Watch that - maybe they are lying, but thats what they claim their capabilities are.
And, if you think about it for even a moment, they would in fact need such capability, so they could detect if someone was launching a nuclear warhead at them from the other side of the world. They want to know about such an event the second the missile is airborne. *shrugs* They don't need to wait for the missile to come "over the horizon".
Isn't Backblaze paying somebody else to backup your data in The Cloud
I was just talking about Backblaze storage pods. They built themselves a relatively cheap storage solution and released the information to build your own.
You lose a lot of inflection and verbal cues in the transcription, though. When we're talking national security and a giant budget, why skimp?
True, but you can still do something like keep 5% (prioritized through data mining) of phonecalls online as full audio in a hard drive solution and put the other 95% on tape, and use the transcript as a sort of index to the whole thing.
I don't think I did either...by my math I just implied that the data had to be available sometime the same day (or within 24 hours, I guess) to get the bandwidth figure. Of course, the longer it takes to be available, the less valuable the system is for dealing with threats happening Right Now.
Tape solutions typically have the data available in a matter of a few hours. In theory, you can get data out of a tape library as fast as the autoloader can load the tape and the drive can scan forward to the right part of the tape.
In any case, dealing with threats happening Right Now is usually a ridiculous super hero/spy thriller fantasy. If there's an urgent, sudden situation that pops up out of nowhere like that and you're a spy agency like the NSA, you're just going to miss it. In real life, if a terrorist sleeper cell one day wires up a bus so that it will blow up if it goes over 55 MPH, and you need to track them down in half an hour to take the detonator from them... Well, aside from the fact that it's not going to happen, you're not going to be able to find the data and piece things together on time unless you'd already done it a month ago. Despite thisThe kind of child-men who seem to run these agencies obviously have adolescent power fantasies about being able to deal with such a situation. That's why they build places like the Information Dominance Center
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