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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.
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."
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.
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.
...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
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
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.
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.
It's virtually impossible to make a cellphone call from a plane in flight. Firstly, for all but a very small portion of its likely path, MH370 was over the open ocean (no cell towers out there). Secondly, even over land, a plane is a hollow metal cylinder and a rather effective Faraday cage. Unless you're flying low'n'slow (e.g. 9/11), holding a call is very diffcult. I've tried it before and while I might occasionally get a few bars worth of signal, it's not useable in the real world.
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