Posted on 05/06/2013 10:46:41 AM PDT by kiryandil
A former FBI counterterrorism agent has hinted at a vast and intrusive surveillance network used by the U.S. government to monitor its own citizens.
Tim Clemente admitted as much when he appeared on CNN Wednesday night.
Discussing the Boston Marathon attack and past telephone conversations of Katherine Russell and her now deceased husband, suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Clemente said that those conversations would be available to investigators.
Clemente discussed the issue in this exchange with host Erin Burnett, as recorded by the CNN transcript...
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Where are these super servers storing all this information?
Really is there enough memory in the universe to store all the data?
According to this, 3 billion per day or almost 35 thousand per second
If anyone is assigned to listening to my phone calls, I feel sorry for the SOB. He must be the most bored man on the planet.
Imagine a room the size of a gymnasium filled with cabinets the size of refrigerators. In each cabinet are two hundred terabyte drives. How many calls and emails could be recorded and saved? What if there was more than one room like this? Supercomputers could be used to scan the phone calls and emails for certain key words. The vast majority of calls would be ignored by the software but calls that raised enough red flags could then be sent to an analyst who could listen to the call and determine the context of the pre-selected words to determine if an actual threat existed. I think it’s possible.
One was just built in Utah. I doubt we have the capability that the FBI agent claims.
“What would the memory requirements for this be?”
Whatever they are, this should handle it:
http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/
Wouldn’t that help out the bad guys?
Probably not unless it is done as a speech to text conversion. 3 Billion calls per day is a LOT of data. A years worth could be millions of Terabytes or more.
as someone that has created voip systems, i can tell you the audio can be stored @ about 20 kbps (and that would include encryption). the audio quality would be perfectly fine for conversational understanding (careful not to say ‘perfect’)
so the question of storage comes down to... how many minutes do Americans talk on the phone every year? this will lead you to the answer for whether or not it’s easily stored. at first blush, i’d say it’d be no problem if they designed it properly.
indexing it so you can properly pull up all the data related to a person of interest is then key. applying voice recognition to allow for the audio to be ‘parsed’ is also doable. this allows for a call to be flagged in real time and routed to the proper person
the show ‘person of interest’ only gets far fetched when ‘the machine’ starts thinking on its own. otherwise, all the data collection and references into the past is completely possible if not available today
i’m waiting for the day it’s allowed in courts... at which point a judge would bring up your calls over the passed 10 years and point out some behavior from a call years ago to hold against you.
Well... duh. Everyone had to already assume this.
Take heed what you say of your senior..
Be your word spoken or plain
Lest a bird of the air tell the matter
and so ye shall hear it again
“The storage capacity of the Utah Data Center will be measured in “zettabytes”. What exactly is a zettabyte? There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte; a thousand terabytes in a petabyte; a thousand petabytes in an exabyte; and a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte.”
That is why I used to pepper my conversations with words like "Clinton bombing," followed by, "I sure hope I just tripped a wire."
Maybe they have me down as a harmless crackpot.
My wife is on the phone 5 hrs. a day I bet they get tired of listening to her.
Voice compresses very well - it's not music. Gaps between words take almost nothing to store, and much of the dynamic range can get compressed away without losing the meaning of the content. Further, speech recognition can be used to create a searchable index so that they can find specific calls and then pull up the recording itself to review further.
Echelon, I think it's called.
Government has been building huge data storage systems for many years.
Bomb! Japan has just flashed Pearl Bailey, I mean...
See link in 22. 3 billion phone calls per day or almost 35 thousand per second.
Average length of phone call is 3 minutes according to this:
http://adraughtofvintage.com/2012/05/07/average-length-of-local-cell-phone-call-in-2003-was-3-min-in-2010-its-1-min-47-sec/
Just playing around.... So we have 35K calls per second * 3 minutes per call on an average is 105K Minutes of recording per second.
16.4kb per minute of storage * 105K minutes = 1,722,000kb per second (9.5GB per second)
9.5GB per second * 60 seconds per minute = 570GB per minute * 60 minutes per hour = 34 TB/Hour (rounded)
= 816 TB per day
= 25K TB per month
= 293K TB per year
It sounds like a lot but it isn’t as bad as I first thought.
IBM already has a 120 Petabyte drive that is public.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/425237/ibm-builds-biggest-data-drive-ever/
So under 300 of those drives for a year’s conversations.
Absolutely correct. Recall Clinton’s comments to Monica - he knew everything in this country was being monitored by another “friendly” Government.
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