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 ...
I been telling people this for years.
This is why cell data encryption was crippled.
They justify it because the data is simply recorded and stored and it supposedly requires a warrant to make it available to an investigation.
The cell call in the Travon Martin case is recorded and stored.
Imagine all the juicy cell data that must exist for the Chicago area for the last decade or so....
There are cell phones available with unbreakable encryption... just not for the general public.
It is possible to modify a phone so that the CPU uses unbreakable public-key encryption... doing this would raise a large red flag over you.
I remember being told that the Soviets were listening in on phone conversations when I first got my security clearance back in the mid-80s.
I just figured that everything except face to face was public knowledge.
I would think part of the agreement would be the government would insulate the phone companies from lawsuits.
Besides, anything broadcast can be intercepted by a third party.
Besides, merely recording a signal isn't the same as eavesdropping, if you only passively record it and don't listen until you've decided to put a particular person under an electron microscope...
Entire skyscrapers in mid-town Manhattan are being stripped of walls, etc. and filled with just supercomputers. They are located in mid-town as that is where the server cables come into Manhattan, which gives them a microsecond of lead time on Wall Street.
The speaker was some math guy at a technology symposium talking about how algorithms are changing our lives, etc. Not some nutcase.
Utah.
A good rule of thumb - the Wall Street Journal test. Are you prepared to have whatever you say over the phone or email (or however electronically transmitted) published on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. If not - don’t say or send it.
While I learned and practiced this in business, I’ve also tried to teach my kids this. There are a lot of people who are stupid enough to post things publicly and have paid the price - but even private communications are at risk.
Speaking as one who actually has been quoted by The Wall Street Journal, that’s a good rule of thumb!
doing a quick google, i see some mention an average of 459 minutes per month for cell users. assuming double that to cover all home and work phone calls. rounding it to about 1,000 minutes/month... or about 33 minutes per day (rounding to 2000 seconds/day)
assuming 250m people in the US may use a phone, that would put the total audio volume around 500 billion seconds per day
allowing for a quality recording around 20 kpbs... the storage requirement would be about 10.24 quadrillion bits/day or 1,192,092 gb/day
allowing for 2 recording stations per state, 100 stations total, the per station recording would be about 12,000 gb/day. averaging across a 16 hr day, this would put the hourly recording requirement per station around 745 gb/hour
assuming at least 32 active drives to record incoming data for each station, this would put the load per drive to about 23.3 gb/hour ... or about 398 mb/min.. or 6.8 mb/sec.
drives today can write in excess of 100 mb/sec
drives in such a system would need to be changed about once a day. once swapped out they would be placed in storage for future reference, if needed
applying real-time voice recognition to these audio streams would produce a text file. the text file would then be parsed and indexed for phrases then rated across a multitude of categories. if it rated high enough, it would automatically be routed to the attending agents.
the name of the text file would be recorded in a database along with the time, date, duration, and call_file_id. this id would be used to map the call participants identity record to the call. the person_id table would also map to another table to record location information.
with a small bit of work... you now have a system that knows what was said .. between whom (numerous people in a call)... and where each person was while the call was taking place.
with a little bit of algorithmic magic, i could easily find a second order of associates using such a database... identifying the larger group.
and yes, i could easily put this system together ... given the funding.
therefore, i have no doubt such a system exists
Or perhaps the best example being that lengthy and crystal clear recording of Newt Gingrich that was allegedly made by a pair of Democrat activists cruising along with a scanner that just happened to pick up Newt’s call and was hard-wired into a tape recorder. Yeah, RIIIIIIght.
Skype only then...
Are you surprised that your government is actually a fascist organization that doesn’t give a rat’s a$$ about ANY amendment?
We are now living in a police state. For years the commie libs whined about the GOP trying to take away their freedom and liberty while invading their privacy. Now that it is actually happening? Crickets! I guess it’s okay if a Marxist does it.
Not many paid attention. There was a congressional act that permitted, and perhaps required, that telephony switches provide a port for government monitoring. I did software for switches and was surprised, at first. Our technology went into ATT switches which were sold to Sprint and other suppliers. This was the rule by the mid-90s. It involved part of the signaling technology at the heart of voice telephony known as SS7 that also permits caller ID and conference calling. But the extra port was strictly a government requirement. We had nothing to do with the monitoring technology connected to the extra port. But my son, in mathematical linguistics, is being courted by Google. Soon he may have to stop talking to me about his work!
Most of the monitoring is probably done using high speed speech analysis. Voice traffic is relatively low-bandwidth. Speech analysis is remarkably sophisticated. Listening for keywords is perfectly reasonable with existing technology. Temporarily storing voice calls is also no big challenge, only big money, and we print that.
If this is the case and such monitoring was negotiated through a treaty with the Brits, this would be an abuse of federal government power to negotiate treaties imo. Not only had Thomas Jefferson warned about such abuses of treaty power, but the Supreme Court had officially clarified that such abuse is unconstitutional.
"In giving to the President and Senate a power to make treaties, the Constitution meant only to authorize them to carry into effect, by way of treaty, any powers they might constitutionally exercise." --Thomas Jefferson: The Anas, 1793."Surely the President and Senate cannot do by treaty what the whole government is interdicted from doing in any way." --Thomas Jefferson: Parliamentary Manual, 1812.
"2. Insofar as Art. 2(11) of the Uniform Code of Military Justice provides for the military trial of civilian dependents accompanying the armed forces in foreign countries, it cannot be sustained as legislation which is "necessary and proper" to carry out obligations of the United States under international agreements made with those countries, since no agreement with a foreign nation can confer on Congress or any other branch of the Government power which is free from the restraints of the Constitution (emphasis added)." --Reid v. Covert, 1956.
So if the feds have been doing this on a grand scale for years, why have they never foiled any plots?
Sure, they may be paying people to “monitor” communications, but that doesn’t mean they are producing any results.
He says that within about a week after September 11, 2001, NSA "decided to start spying on the U.S. domestically, on all U.S. citizens they could get". He says the data center in Utah has the capacity (five zettabytes) to store all worldwide communication for 100 years.
Encryption Bookmark.
Yes that would have been my understanding as well. All data but not all content. I work in the industry as well. However either my knowledge is lacking (possible due to need to know restrictions) or these people are confused about the difference between call data and call content. Not sure. I know it is certainly possible to record everything but it would involve significant costs in facilities, shadow network and recording equipment
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