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William Binney: NSA Records and Stores 80% of All US Audio Calls
stephendavion sends a report at The Guardian about remarks from whistleblower William Binney, who left the NSA after its move toward overreaching surveillance following the September 11th attacks. Binney says, "At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the U.S. The NSA lies about what it stores." He added, "The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control, but I’m a little optimistic with some recent Supreme Court decisions, such as law enforcement mostly now needing a warrant before searching a smartphone." One of Binney's biggest concerns about government-led surveillance is its lack of oversight: "The FISA court has only the government’s point of view. There are no other views for the judges to consider. There have been at least 15-20 trillion constitutional violations for U.S. domestic audiences and you can double that globally."
Seeing as this would be petabytes of data every month, it should be easy enough to find out if the NSA is purchasing enough storage to accomplish something like this. Where's the proof of that?
SHOCKED!
I saw Mr. Binney speak at the HOPE conference in 2012. I remember a conversation with my parents where I relayed what I learned from him to them, and they thought I was buying into some conspiracy. When Snowden broke into the news, they asked me how I had known so far ahead of time.
I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion about Binney's whistle-blowing in the wake of the Snowden revelations. He has been sounding the alarm for many years now.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
If you're wondering why it's only 80% instead of 100%, it's because he's talking about all calls made everywhere. He says that 80% of the fiber in the world runs through the US, so 80% of the calls in the world are recorded. In other words, the NSA is recording all calls that go through the country.
Incidentally, didn't Obama announce some changes he was going to make to fix the NSA? Have any of those been implemented?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Right after 9/11, in the heat to Get Those Guys and their network, the NSA went into vast recoding depositories to track back conversations, actual recorded calls. They admitted it and it kind of blew by in the moment.
Am I the only one who remembers this?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Duh.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
We should elect a Constitutional scholar to be President so he can change this for us.
Step 1. Collect all audio
Step 2. Convert speech to text
Step 3. ???
Step 4. Profit
The IT guy and geek in me gets all excited thinking about all of the cool technology that they are leveraging.
The civil libertarian in me shudders knowing how easily they are able to contextualize and analyze the communications with the intent of subverting public discourse.
The cynical part of me is starting to believe that the average American really does not care because they are so conditioned that they have zero desire to enjoy any sort of true freedom. As long as they have access to shopping malls, housing and alcohol / caffeine / prescription drugs, they will be content.
If the NSA can track people's movements, track who comes into contact with them, or just flat out records their phone calls, how many of our local/state/federal politicians, policy makers, law enforcement members, bureaucrats, bankers, CEOs, etc., could be blackmailed based on such information?
Next question. Who controls the NSA?
I'd put down good money that he doesn't even have a grasp of how much data that would constitute, and how much that would cost.
How much would it be? Serious question. Phone audio compresses very well, after all.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
People expected a Constitutional scholar to follow and protect the Constitution. Instead, what we ended up with was someone who was very well wise to how to work out all the loopholes. Yes, I know you were joking, and I enjoyed it, I'm just pointing out the rather sad state of affairs.
Realistically, I'm not sure things would be much better if we had a different president. Even Ron Paul, who would assuredly do his damnedest to actually set things right, would be one man against an army of criminal, power-hungry scum. Still, I'd rather take a man that tries over a man that supports this evil.
How come everyone forgets that Atta and his buddies did not trust cellphones as far back as 911. Now I am sure they are even more paranoid about their use.
Yes, if you cannot do basic arithmetic, it is.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You really do not live in this world. Huge phone-audio archives are easy to do, small and cheap. Ask Avaya for example.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
You're just wrong. In fact, we now have proof (Snowden revelations) that things carried on at the NSA pretty much exactly like he said it would. I think you also underestimate how much compression can be applied to telephone conversations. They are, after all, mostly "dead air". In addition, speech is very predictable. The phone companies take advantage of this to fit many conversations over lines of surprisingly modest bandwidth. Since the NSA is directly connected at the backbone (their secret ATT closets are well documented), they don't even have to do the compression themselves. They can just log the packets.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
So what if the NSA stores your data? Who cares if it's "Constitutional"? The Constitution is just a piece of paper and doesn't mean a damned fucking thing because even if some uppity people over at the ACLU or EFF make a case out if it, it will be discarded under the veil of "National Security" Face it, the USA is a Police State. AND YOU WONT DO A FUCKING THING ABOUT IT BECAUSE YOU ARE A WEAK POWERLESS WAGE SLAVE WHO VALUES YOUR SUV, JOB AND GADGETS OVER "LIBERTY" and look to someone else to fix the things you don't like. So I don't see why anyone should care -- because no one cares and nothing will be done. Perhaps these articles get posted because people like bitching about how powerless and helpless they choose to be in their pathetic existence as peons of the wealthy elite whose interests the NSA serves.
Not from this disclosure specifically, but ever since 2001, I've learned one important thing: we've underestimated what has actually been done. Remember those stories years ago about secret data centre taps that were tied into major fibre/international cable telecommunications hubs in places like San Francisco? Imagine what *could* be done with that! Imagine if that is one example of what is tapped at every ingress/egress communications point in a country. That was way back in 2006. No, no, that's paranoia. And there are legal protections that would prevent it.
All implemented. Everything. The sky's the limit. Billions and billions of dollars to do it? Here's the cash. Even the legal protections have been circumvented by using ridiculous legal tricks such as collecting everything. As long as nobody looks at it or no citizens are specifically "targetted", that is somehow fine and not mass surveillance? It's not a "search"? It's like going into every house in the country and passively photographing and recording everything there, but as long as nobody looks at that vast database unless there's some token cause, it's not a "search". It's like some kind of bizarro quantum mechanical legal theory where unless it is observed, the collected data exists in a legal limbo that doesn't make it a search until actively searched.
No, it is mass surveillance. And no matter how much you trust the people doing it, the results of that search are just sitting there waiting to be abused.
Of course, but how much money? We already know that the NSA has huge amounts of money and storage. Besides, audio going over the telephone is already compressed horribly.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion about Binney's whistle-blowing in the wake of the Snowden revelations. He has been sounding the alarm for many years now.
Because the media is incompetent. The days of investigative journalism like Woodward and Bernstein are loooong gone.
There's no money in it.
You know where the money is? Look at Fox News. Their content is where the money is - political punditry.
Fluff.
MSNBC, CNN, and everyone else is also to blame. Fox News at least - or Rupert anyway - had the balls to say it upfront.
I watched 60 Minutes the other week, and just shook my head at how they turned to shit. CBS used to be the best.
The people - you people included - just want to watch "news" that reinforces what they believe - not the facts. Sure, facts are shown but put in a way to match the World view of the audience.
I do not mind them record my calls, if they give me tax breaks, pay part of my phone bill, or let me use the recording myself. Isn't this the Google model anyway?
I have been posted before there is simply no way the NSA could have use for even the most conservative estimates for there storage capacity in that Utah data center unless they are or were planning to keep the content.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
silent phone or get a blackphone?
Was the thought in my head as I glanced at the headline...
Liar... Fraud...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Impeach him. Can we retroactively impeach Bush as well?
Scum, the lot of them.
People keep praising Ron Paul yet everything I have ever seen on his actual policies scare me more than Cheney working with Obama to create what laws should be enforced.
Paul recent budget had a net increase in spending and a net reduction in income.
You can't be a fiscal conservative and not decrease spending
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Fun fact: You've had all your calls intercepted since at least the early 1980s, America, in violation of the US Constitution.
I can neither confirm nor deny that I have firsthand knowledge of such data collection.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The NSA and the mil intel agencies all run off the non-published "black" budget, which you're not told about.
And you wonder why we're in debt ... it's not welfare checks, it's the stuff you're not allowed to know about that we do each and every day.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Raw phone audio traffic/data, at least on cellular which makes up the vast majority of telephone traffic these days, is already heavily compressed at the air interface level to allow companies to maximize the voice traffic they can carry across a channel without increasing physical capacity. It would be hard to compress it much further and still be audible. Hell, on Verizon Wireless's network it is already practically inaudible due to the compression.
You'd basically just have to dump it to disk which wouldn't be processor intensive whatsoever nor would it take much disk. 8k EVRC is a common audio codec, which you could store roughly 30 years of phone calls on a 1TB disk at 8kbps. More reading on EVRC
Instead, what we ended up with was someone who was very well wise to how to work out all the loopholes.
What? Obama worked out all the loopholes to enable spying? Please! That's suggesting he actually gave enough of a rat's ass about the Constitution to worry about side-stepping it. No need, just have a quasi-legal court apparatus working in secret that approves everything that gets near it.
Then, when the annoying asses^H^H^H^H^H public makes a fuss about this egregious violation of our nation's founding document you do what a duplicitous, double-speaking, consummate politician does.. say something like "Look - I know there are concerns about finding the right balance between our civil liberties and our security and frankly I share them. I am appointing a special secret committee of NSA folks to review all this and report their findings to me. Now fuck off^H^H^H^H I want to assure you that your concerns are heard loud and clear. God bless America."
Nah. Not HERE, in the land of the Free, with Rule of Law!
But?
We were right all the time. Unfettered by doctrine, dogma of allegiances, wary of our own cognitive bias, we saw what we saw.
Bitter vindication.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Realistically, I'm not sure things would be much better if we had a different president. Even Ron Paul, who would assuredly do his damnedest to actually set things right, would be one man against an army of criminal, power-hungry scum. Still, I'd rather take a man that tries over a man that supports this evil.
Vote Snowden/Binney 2016.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
I'm pretty sure the loopholes were worked out for him by the previous administration. It's a good thing too, because he never would have been able to get the bills authorizing this bullshit through Congress.
http://nothingchanged.org/ Vote third party or don't bother
Try attacking it the other way.
If they AREN'T recording everything then why such big data centers? Metadata on every US call for the year would fit on a few dozen HDs max probably much less.
Raw data takes very little space with no media components involved. We ran 10 years worth of billing info on one 14MB drive platter in the 80-90's.
True point
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Voice prints, key words, known callers are so 1980's. Collect it all is now the mission. Then sort.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
The people of the USA should demand a Constitutional Expert Committee vet all new laws prior to getting voted in. If they say it's bad the Congress could still vote it into law- but if it was later thrown out by the courts then all the Congress critters who voted for it would be legally liable. This way the government can still "Do the right thing!" when they see the need, yet are still held accountable when they don't.
The USA has a crap phone system, to gather 80%of voice calls would require a duplicate network almost as big as the existing one! could not be done without most technicians noticing. He almost had me believing until I read the words, " total population control" yer, right.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Allow people to direct EXACTLY what their taxes go to @ the year end prior while doing their taxes for that year, one more sheet to fill out (perhaps more, but the point is there), allowing every tax payer to select WHERE THEIR TAXED DOLLARS WENT TO/GO TO for the next year.
ANYONE RUNNING for President of the USA ON THAT PROMISE for his main campaign platform ALONE, as long as it's kept, WOULD WIN IN A LANDSLIDE!
Bet a lot of these wars, nsa spying, etc. would be stopped, cold.
If Slashdot had posted a story about "the Lone Gunmen" pilot episode, then they would have a scoop that anticipated the 9/11 attacks with a civilian airliner, by several months...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Wow.
You're good.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That would make a *great* bumper sticker.
your choice as a citizen voter is, there's really only two teams on the field, no matter your third-party dreams. next best hope is to knock the next weakest player off the field.
AND "NOT VOTING" - IS SURRENDER.
If you limit yourself to the two main parties, you have surrendered even more. You are legitimizing the system as a whole by casting your vote, and you are legitimizing the actions of the major parties by giving it to one of them. Vote for a third party or don't vote at all. By reinforcing the idea that you should only go D or R, you are part of the problem.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Move north.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Any farther north, and I'll be in Canada, but thanks for the tip.
Writhe your naked ass to the mindless groove.
Thank you! Just yesterday, in fact, I submitted this one for an initial 25 prints as proofs, and if they come out right I'll be printing 2,000 to hand out at Burning Man. What do you think of Snowden Doctorow versus Snowden Binney? The upside to Doctorow is name recognition and the approachability of his writing, particularly Little Brother and Homeland. The upside of using Binney, of course, is that more people should know what he has done for his country.
Your thoughts? (and if you ping me off list at bob at thrhahxhehl.com remove all the h's, I'll mail you a few)
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Hell, maybe mine does too I just never bothered checking. When I saw that he could convert his voice mail to text I knew the government was recording all of our conversations.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
"Don't use your phone, don't use mine. Don't speak treason, the're tapping the line". Redgum - ASIO (1984)
BTW: You're on my lawn, you know what to do.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Love it! I can just picture 2000 freak-mobiles rolling out of Burning Man with those plastered on the bumper. Do think about doing some Snowden / Binney ones too, though - for the reason you mention.
With each accusation, the NSA has 'admitted' to a small bit and denied the rest. Each denial has been proven to be a lie. They have proven now that nothing they say can ever be trusted. They have lied under oath. They have lied to Congress, and they have lied to the People. Repeatedly.
Since we can never trust anything they say, why should we continue to employ them? The entire organization is rotten to the core. The only possible cure is to disband them and start over. A mere re-org would just be moving the deck chairs.
Yeah, I get a chuckle every time I hear some IT manager at my employer talk about "big data." Often it is followed by a reference to an archive of raw scientific data which spans maybe 8-10 TB from the last 6 years or so and is mostly junk in a huge variety of formats.
When your big data problem can fit in the PC sitting under my desk, it isn't a big data problem. Heck, I'd give them "you can solve it like you would a big data problem" angle except they're not really doing that either.
Umm, no it is in fact entitlement spending. By a long ways. The black budgets may be black, but they still have to be accounted for and you can actually find out the total of the black budget allocations, just not what they are going for.
Here's Snowden/Binney. I'm a little frustrated with the extra negative space below the "den" in Snowden, because Binney's name is too short, and the tall "i" and hanging "y" are messing with me, and I'm not a graphic designer. I've moved and resized everything but I keep coming back to the original layout. I'm tempted to change their roles on the ticket because Binney/Snowden fits great. grumble grumble
I guess I just have to remember that I'm making a statement, not an actual political campaign -- it need not be perfect to achieve its goal.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Even further north (and perhaps west) and you're back in the States. Quickly Googling I see this, http://www.epa.gov/climatechan....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
That would be a great way to get Snowden back to the USA. I have very strong doubts that a President elected by the "people" would be prosecuted for treason, illegally disseminating classified documents, etc.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire
And I suppose the fact that government surveillance is old news, we should all just acquiesce? There are always tradeoffs that have to be made in a so-called representative democracy. But to sacrifice freedom for security? Where does individual responsibility for one's own safety come into play? Rather than placing the sole burden for that on a monstrosity called "law enforcement and national security agencies". As Benjamin Franklin is claimed to have said, "those who are willing to sacrifice freedom for a little security, deserve neither." Don't get me wrong, there is a place for central government and I'm not one of those "free citizens" who reject the very idea of a national or state government and live by their own "code". Yet it is indisputable modern America is becoming less and less "free" unless freedom is redefined to mean "cooperation with the government".
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire
Of a set of apps, that included Carnivor, that could listen to audio, transcribe it perfectly, uniquely identify the various speakers on the call, identify different discussions weaving through the conversation and summarize them.
Every rule has more than one consequence.
Love it! Understand about the layout, that stuff is hard to get right. It might possibly help to go to a 2-line layout. Maybe upsize the star / flag and use as background. You might consider adding an All-Seeing Eye logo for visual balance and as an attention-getter. Anyway, it's cool that you're taking the time to make these. It may not be an actual campaign, but it's important to get the word out.
I'd like to agree with you, but half the people I know think the current President, who was elected twice by "we the people", should be prosecuted for treason because basically "I don't like him".
And then the FBI will walk in with an NSL and demand the keys. Just like they do now.
True... but then he didn't lead us into a 12 year war on false premises.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire
I appreciate you taking the time to comment and give suggestions. I think I am going to go with Snowden/Binney, and that I will stop fiddling with the design. Thank you!
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
People keep praising Ron Paul yet everything I have ever seen on his actual policies scare me more than Cheney working with Obama to create what laws should be enforced.
Paul recent budget had a net increase in spending and a net reduction in income.
You're probably thinking of Paul Ryan, or possibly even Rand Paul, Ron Paul's son. Ron Paul is out of politics and not submitting budgets.