I am also at a point where I don't trust anything coming out of the NSA or the US government. Maybe it's true or maybe they 1) transferred more domestic spying over to GHCQ or some other Five Eyes partner 2) transferred these responsibilities to some other agency 3) everything is still stored and they don't count that as "collecting call records".
Again, please understand that the NSA uses a non-English definition of the word "collect".
The NSA calls getting data and copying data to its datacenters "interception".
It calls having a human NSA employee read that data, "collection". 99.999% of the data it copies to its datacenters is not "collected".
The NSA copies all your phone calls and emails and web browsing and so on. ALL. It only reads some of them. Each of these articles is always written about one particular narrow NSA program, ignoring other very-similar programs, in order to minimize the apparent spying going on. For this article, the 151M records being talked about are one tiny program to query telephone call records generated by US phone companies. This is like 0.01% of what the NSA pays attention to. The NSA is already intercepting the full call anyway! But that's a different program...
The distinction does make sense though. If an intercept is taken, never looked at, and eventually deleted, then from a 'privacy violation' point of view it may as well not have been collected at all.
But these still need to be intercepted in the first place, because you don't know in advance which of the 0.01% of records are of interest.
"The N.S.A. took in the 151 million records despite obtaining court orders to use the system on only 42 terrorism suspects in 2016, along with a few left over from late 2015, the report said."
Needle meet haystack. I wonder.how.many were actually brought up on charges?
Not to defend the NSA on ethical grounds, but at least on practical grounds, I would personally find that many records to be a decent trade-off for 42 arrested and convicted suspects who were likely to commit violent acts at some point. As for whether that's the case, who knows.
Isn't Facebook still doing this? You have to explicitly restrict FB access to your microphone or they will use convos to inform advertising ... or conspiracy theory?
They do listen. I believe this is openly on their help pages. They dont store 'raw audio' so must turn this into text or meta data. FB use the information to help identify what you are watching/listening to to help improve your posts... so yeah pretty much going o be used for advertising.
I wonder how many people would remove FB if they knew this. I'm one of the people less bothered by internet advertising (I commented to this about 3 days ago re ad-blocking and cookies) and to me it seems amazing people accept this level of intrusion.
Does anyone hear seriously believe they only "took in" 151 million of anything? That's a single flashdrive. NSA operates datacenters. The things they collect are measured by numbers well into billions.
> The Utah Data Center, also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center,[1] is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger.
Collected, as defined by the NSA, is only the data that they looked at, not the data that they have. And they probably don't count the data that was looked at by a program.
William Binney (former NSA employee turned critic/whistleblower) in 2013 said there were 3 billion phone calls per day in the US[1]. In 2010 Pew[2] said 82% of adults made an average of 5 phone calls per day (~800 million calls), so 3 billion seems reasonable considering business calls, telemarketers, etc.
151 million in a year out of 365 * 3 billion is pretty small.
My opinion regarding the NSA has changed over time. During the Snowden revelations (Snowden is still a hero of mine), I was greatly opposed to foreign spying, e.g. on Petrobras and Angela Merkel.
Over the years I've realized how powerful and important such information is for peaceful diplomacy, and that the United States has a post-WWII responsibility to maintain that peace.
However, the recent debacle regarding potential political spying has vindicated my earliest fears - that this can be used to subvert the domestic democratic process. Doesn't matter whether the spying did or did not occur (probably both sides are stretching the truth). We're living in an age where it is at least conceivable by a large portion of the country that the NSA's tools were improperly used against US citizens. It's time for a vigorous debate on clear guidelines regarding these powers.
My first thought was that 151M call records is not a significant amount considering that we're talking about the population of the United States.
Rough calculations based on some very round numbers is that this would account for between .019 and .033 percent of the adult US population. (~150M call records/year ~= 50-80,000 people, US Adult Population ~ 242,470,800)
Extrapolated, that number is a little concerning. By my estimate, that means between 2 and 3 of every 10K people is under some sort of surveillance.
But then again... apply that to say... San Francisco - population ~900K and you get between 180 and 270 people. Or NYC with 1.7M people and you get between 340 and 510 people.
151 million records sounds like a very, very low number of phone records for US. Suspiciously low, in fact. I would expect that amount to come out from the records of the domestic surveillance organisations of Luxembourg.
Almost definitely because that's the number of records inspected directly by a human, not the number that are stored, or the number that are inspected by algorithms.
I don't use the phone particularly a lot, and I probably make 1 call per day on average. So I make 365 calls a year. Let's say 350 to round.
There are about 200,000,000 US adults.
So if everyone makes as many calls as me, that's 70,000,000,000 calls a year. Each call should generate two book-keeping entries at the carriers -- so ~150 billion records a year. (Note: pure supposition this is what they mean by 'record', but phone carriers giving them a metadata firehose seems consistent with what we know.)
So, we're talking 0.1% (and quite possibly less) of the phone calls?
Ya know, I'm probably okay with that level of snooping on metadata from a spy agency (especially if they're not sharing the data with domestic agencies for domestic cases).
Ed:
I'm likely off by being at least an order of magnitude too low -- divide all my estimates of people targeted by 10 or so.
It's not a random sample of 0.1% of calls, though. Rather, they're collecting all the call metadata of a small fraction of subscribers; the number of people targeted may be relatively small (though not small in absolute terms), but each person targeted has their privacy significantly invaded, as the NSA learns quite a lot about their life. And to be targeted, you only have to have once talked to someone for whom the NSA has a "reasonable suspicion" they might be involved in terrorism. No need to do anything suspicious yourself.
A couple years ago, I handled dialer traffic for a modestly-sized dialer wholesaler. The total number of bookkeeping entries due to their traffic was 2-3 billion per week, representing perhaps 500M-1B call attempts. And I was basically a nobody.
151M call records is incredibly tiny, though they will be targeted and thus probably represent near 100% of the calls for some group of people.
One would presume that SMS and MMS messages get caught up in this too. I send an order of magnitude more texts than phone calls. The % of users caught up in the dragnet must certainly be smaller than your estimate.
Vatican Shadow is an artist that makes music about the War on Terror. I would recommend "Remeber Your Black Day" or "Death Is Unity With God".
It's a spiritual continuation of the work of the deceased UK artist Muslimgauze who's released 90+ releases so far, and who has dedicated over half his short life to making music to protest the Israel-Palestine conflict. There are still quarterly+ releases of his work 18 years after his death because he left a huge back catalog of unreleased work. At his peak he was making an album a day, and if you gave him something to listen to he'd return you an "improved version" the next day.
Muzlimgauze's intent was to call attention to, and make people read about the Israel-Palestine conflict; I think Vatican Shadow has a similar intention.
Yeah yeah the NSA data mines everyone and their dog. Welcome to 2013. Now why doesn't the NYT investigate what other illegal skullduggery the NSA and its 16 sister agencies are involved in? Wasn't there a massive leak of intel agency info to Wikileaks a few months ago? Oh yeah I forgot...the NYT, along with the rest of the mainstream media, act as neoliberalism's propaganda department and are about as interested in truth and honesty as, say, Donald Trump.
[+] [-] rl3|9 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14222114
[+] [-] pmoriarty|9 years ago|reply
What humans could resist such enormous power?
[+] [-] 3131s|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucasmullens|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jellicle|9 years ago|reply
The NSA calls getting data and copying data to its datacenters "interception".
It calls having a human NSA employee read that data, "collection". 99.999% of the data it copies to its datacenters is not "collected".
The NSA copies all your phone calls and emails and web browsing and so on. ALL. It only reads some of them. Each of these articles is always written about one particular narrow NSA program, ignoring other very-similar programs, in order to minimize the apparent spying going on. For this article, the 151M records being talked about are one tiny program to query telephone call records generated by US phone companies. This is like 0.01% of what the NSA pays attention to. The NSA is already intercepting the full call anyway! But that's a different program...
[+] [-] besselheim|9 years ago|reply
But these still need to be intercepted in the first place, because you don't know in advance which of the 0.01% of records are of interest.
[+] [-] willstrafach|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vuln|9 years ago|reply
Needle meet haystack. I wonder.how.many were actually brought up on charges?
[+] [-] jjguy|9 years ago|reply
(Based on an estimate of 10B calls per day worldwide)
[+] [-] meowface|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mrtierne|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gustomaximus|9 years ago|reply
I wonder how many people would remove FB if they knew this. I'm one of the people less bothered by internet advertising (I commented to this about 3 days ago re ad-blocking and cookies) and to me it seems amazing people accept this level of intrusion.
[+] [-] iopuy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandworm101|9 years ago|reply
Does anyone hear seriously believe they only "took in" 151 million of anything? That's a single flashdrive. NSA operates datacenters. The things they collect are measured by numbers well into billions.
[+] [-] nyolfen|9 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
[+] [-] awqrre|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omginternets|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asn0|9 years ago|reply
151 million in a year out of 365 * 3 billion is pretty small.
1. http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/10/what-do-they-know-about-yo...
2. http://www.pewinternet.org/2010/09/02/cell-phones-and-americ...
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pvnick|9 years ago|reply
Over the years I've realized how powerful and important such information is for peaceful diplomacy, and that the United States has a post-WWII responsibility to maintain that peace.
However, the recent debacle regarding potential political spying has vindicated my earliest fears - that this can be used to subvert the domestic democratic process. Doesn't matter whether the spying did or did not occur (probably both sides are stretching the truth). We're living in an age where it is at least conceivable by a large portion of the country that the NSA's tools were improperly used against US citizens. It's time for a vigorous debate on clear guidelines regarding these powers.
[+] [-] Steeeve|9 years ago|reply
My first thought was that 151M call records is not a significant amount considering that we're talking about the population of the United States.
Rough calculations based on some very round numbers is that this would account for between .019 and .033 percent of the adult US population. (~150M call records/year ~= 50-80,000 people, US Adult Population ~ 242,470,800)
Extrapolated, that number is a little concerning. By my estimate, that means between 2 and 3 of every 10K people is under some sort of surveillance.
But then again... apply that to say... San Francisco - population ~900K and you get between 180 and 270 people. Or NYC with 1.7M people and you get between 340 and 510 people.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ptaipale|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3131s|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SomeStupidPoint|9 years ago|reply
I don't use the phone particularly a lot, and I probably make 1 call per day on average. So I make 365 calls a year. Let's say 350 to round.
There are about 200,000,000 US adults.
So if everyone makes as many calls as me, that's 70,000,000,000 calls a year. Each call should generate two book-keeping entries at the carriers -- so ~150 billion records a year. (Note: pure supposition this is what they mean by 'record', but phone carriers giving them a metadata firehose seems consistent with what we know.)
So, we're talking 0.1% (and quite possibly less) of the phone calls?
Ya know, I'm probably okay with that level of snooping on metadata from a spy agency (especially if they're not sharing the data with domestic agencies for domestic cases).
Ed:
I'm likely off by being at least an order of magnitude too low -- divide all my estimates of people targeted by 10 or so.
[+] [-] comex|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelGG|9 years ago|reply
151M call records is incredibly tiny, though they will be targeted and thus probably represent near 100% of the calls for some group of people.
[+] [-] brewdad|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cryptarch|9 years ago|reply
It's a spiritual continuation of the work of the deceased UK artist Muslimgauze who's released 90+ releases so far, and who has dedicated over half his short life to making music to protest the Israel-Palestine conflict. There are still quarterly+ releases of his work 18 years after his death because he left a huge back catalog of unreleased work. At his peak he was making an album a day, and if you gave him something to listen to he'd return you an "improved version" the next day.
Muzlimgauze's intent was to call attention to, and make people read about the Israel-Palestine conflict; I think Vatican Shadow has a similar intention.
[+] [-] DanBC|9 years ago|reply
When data changes my gut reaction is "better or worse reporting until shown otherwise", and "what are they counting?"
[+] [-] Sideloader|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rl3|9 years ago|reply
2005.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/bush-lets-us-spy-...