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NSA Wants To Dump the Phone Records It Gathered Over 14 Years (thenextweb.com)
According to The Next Web, the NSA would like to get rid of something that a lot of people wish they'd never had in the first place: phone records that the agency has collected over a
decade
and
a
half (more, really)
of
mass
surveillance.
However, the EFF wants to make sure that the evidence of snooping doesn't get buried along with the actual recorded data. From the article: [T]he government says that it can't be sued by bodies like the EFF. The organization is currently involved in two pending cases seeking a remedy for the past 14 years of illegal phone record collection.
EFF wrote a letter (PDF) to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court last December which it has now made public, explaining that it is ready to discuss options that will allow destruction of the records in ways that still preserve its ability to prosecute the cases.
It'll be interesting to see how this pans out: if the government doesn't agree to a discussion about how to handle these phone records, it's possible that they will remain on file for years to come. Plus, it could allow the NSA to avoid being held accountable for its illegal mass surveillance.
Plus, it could allow the NSA to avoid being held accountable for its illegal mass surveillance.
How would that work? If might relieve them for responsibility for continuing to keep it (assuming they never use it again) but it won't waive potential illegal gathering and keeping in the past (subject to statute of limitations, if present).
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Nobody with a shred of common sense would actually believe that the government would actually erase all of this data. There will absolutely be copies of it on a secure, secret server somewhere in Spookland. This is nothing but a diversionary tactic.
Everything they say is a lie.
Why on earth should the NSA be held accountable for something they implemented on behalf of politicians?
How about prosecuting George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld for torture first?
If the NSA wants to dump it then that probably means they've exhausted any value remaining from analyzing the data. They ought to sell some of the data to marketers. I'm sure that some valuable analytics relevant to them can be gained from the data. Might as well make some revenue from the spying to offset the NSA's huge black budget.
Dumping database A. But before they dump A, they copied A to B.
So even though they are destroying all the data they've collected, there exists the same data elsewhere.
During the purge/copy, anything incriminating the NSA will be wiped.
If I were a criminal defense lawyer in a life sentence or death penalty case I would subpoena these records for potential exculpatory evidence. Take the Making a Murderer situation as an example, wouldn't it be useful to get whatever data is available for Steven Avery, his family, the police etc on the key days in question. Potential exculpatory evidence to prevent unjust life in prison (or the death penalty in other cases) would seem to outweigh any other interests.
I am sure the NSA has two sets of books. They will dump the data on the public books, but still keep the data in their huge data center out west. There is no getting rid of this data, only getting rid of the public's ability to use it against them.
This is great! So they don't need that massive Utah data center any more, right?
It'll close up any time now, I imagine. Now that they won't been keeping the data from their mass warrantless surveillance programs.
Uhh... right?
I don't care nearly as much about the records they already gathered (and I'm not so foolish to think they don't have a backup copy). Aren't they still collecting new records?
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
I really wonder the data size of this 14 years record, even if there probably use some kind of compression.
How much space would fourteen years' worth of compressed metadata take up? I strongly suspect a regular thumb drive would be up to the task. How much space would fourteen years' worth of speech-to-text (or manually transcribed, for higher priority targets) call transcripts compressed with language-specific PPM algorithms require? Doable on a four digit budget, I'm sure. Perhaps three.
Now, when is the last time anyone in the intelligence community was given criminal or civil penalties (or even lost their job) for violating citizens' constitutional rights or for lying to Congress under oath?
There is zero motivation for compliance here.
Let everyone read everyone else's e-mails and conversations: congressmen and presidents, priests, doctors, lawyers, businessmen and their workers, peons and plutocrats. Maybe we can, as a society, come to some conclusion about how we should handle privacy in the future.
Researchers will have a field day. It will be hard to have your voice heard above the din of discontent as society's members see just how bad they look in the mirror.
Let the great leveling begin!
Let's imagine the NSA or a someone working for them, wants to cut up a corpse. Then have sex with it. The NSA worker then proceeds to lick to said corpse. The ejaculate of the NSA worker is all over the dead body.
What I am trying to say: "What can't the NSA get way with?".
They just want to dump it so they can free up the space to keep recording.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
> Metadata consists of at least originating number, called number, time, and duration. Call it 64 bytes per call.
Each phone number needs 34 bits (call it 5 bytes, 40 bits), start time 32 bits, and duration 16 bits. So 17 bytes with dumb storage, no compression, etc.
The sorted field (start time) trivially goes to nearly nothing. Which field depends on how you store it. (If it's a simple log in chronological order, there would one timestamp (with 1-second resolution), followed by a few thousand calls made at that time.
Assuming it is a simple log of start time followed by all of the calls at that time, that's 13 bytes per call, 200 TB total.
It could be stored on a pocket full of micro SD cards.
> There will absolutely be copies of it on a unpatched Windows server somewhere in Hilary's basement.
FTFY
If we're talking about an actual database, I see a few issues with your metric.
First, data alignment - due to the way modern computers are designed, it's probably cheaper/faster to pad out things like 5 byte values to 8 bytes. In addition, this would better allow for capturing country code - their interest in all phone calls is one thing, but I'd estimate that they're at least an order of magnitude more interested in international calls.
By the same token, I'd have start time be 64 bits. This gives them the ability to have sub-second accuracy as well as using standard time protocols. Having an end time rather than duration gives you another 64 bits. Plus, while 16 bits is 'enough' for an 18 hour phone call with 1 second accuracy(unsigned, of course), I know of phone calls longer.
That gives me 32 bytes per call, with all fields aligned at 8 byte increments, which should speed up access times considerably. Yes, it could be compressed. About 500 TB.
Still, the idea that the database is somewhere between 200 and 1000 TB doesn't seem to be that far off. As clodney said - they could be storing more information than just what he said. What if they're also recording the subscriber numbers, which is the number used to represent the actual physical line, not the phone number assigned at the time? What about tower information? Etc...
I don't read AC A human right
The NSA has identified records that they recorded which incriminate people they'd rather NOT get in trouble with, so they want to delete these records so it won't be found out they had them in the first place.
Ya, sure NSA. Fucking fools if you ask me.
Yes, make them CHOKE on it. Make them EAT every last bit of surveillance data, and record every second of it for posterity. And they better not have suddenly deleted it, that's destruction of evidence, and they should be punished for that.
Think about the past and what MAINWAY, MARINA, FAIRVIEW, STORMBREW was or even back to STELLARWIND, MAIN CORE.
Collect it all has not changed as a domestic surveillance system to collect all signals intelligence within the USA.
Some options are:
Bring the gov and mil to the contractors rather than the contractors to a gov site. Same domestic data sets just new mission names and a bit of color of law to say the gov projects have ended as talked about in public.
Bring in more 5 eye staff at "shared" sites or even 3rd party nations with US bases. More BOUNDLESSINFORMANT.
Have other partners in the public or private sector do the collection and then just buy into the product.
The same level of total collection just hidden as more Pen Register Trap and Trace or the use of domestic Analysis Centers or Technology Units.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
this is quite serendipitous as I was just thinking about how I would like to dump the NSA... into a pit and then dump all of their data tapes/drives/etc on top of them... and fill the pit with molten steel. two birds with one stone! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.