I agree. They can listen to anybody. It might take a court order in some or most cases and perhaps none in some or all. This is certainly the case. NSA has conceded this point. But the requirements and compliance with court orders is still a bit fuzzy, at least IMHO.
But the idea that they collect "everything" is just nonsense. This assumes they are collecting digitized audio of all the U.S. phone calls and are putting them is a database system that can be searched.
I don't think so. Lots of speculation that they do. No evidence that they have the capability to do it and that they are doing it. If for no other reason it would be a huge waste of resources as well as being against the law.
So if you have some solid evidence, Snowden or otherwise, lets hear it.
I think you are being completely naive! And also, since when have you ever known the Govt to NOT waste resources and NOT violate the law?
So, the capacity to store everything exists/will exist soon, and the track record says what corrupt powers can do, they do do. Subtract from that what they cannot have access to.
NSA to store yottabytes of surveillance data in Utah megarepository Crunchgear ^ | November 1. 2009 | by Devin Coldewey
Posted on Sunday, November 1, 2009 10:06:31 PM by Jet Jaguar
There’s an interesting article in the current New York Review of books (predictably, a book review) detailing the history of the National Security Agency, that shadowy power-behind-the-power to which we surrender much of our privacy. That in itself is interesting, but I found the introduction a bit shocking: the NSA is constructing a datacenter in the Utah desert that they project will be storing yottabytes of surveillance data. And what is a yottabyte? I’m glad you asked.
There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte, a thousand terabytes in a petabyte, a thousand petabytes in an exabyte, a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte, and a thousand zettabytes in a yottabyte. In other words, a yottabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000GB. Are you paranoid yet?
With today’s data storage capabilities I do not think it is impossible to collect everything.
Sifting through the massive amounts of data is another matter.
No one is listening to what you say unless you sent up several red flags.
There simply is not enough manpower to do so.
It is the tyranny of numbers.
They can collect everything - for a limited amount of time. Their previously announce capability to tape fiber means that they can just pull the entire data-link level stream of data off a fiber bundle, and I’m sure they’ll decide what they want to keep later.
Upon assigning a value to the data in the stream they record, they can then decide to keep it longer, for deeper inspection.
Forbes had the plans for the Utah data center up, and it’s pretty clear that they’re gearing up to store incredible amounts of data.
When i worked for cisco, the CALEA interfaces could be programmed to be terribly non-specific. The limitation back then was the backplane bandwidth to shove dupes of all the packets on all interfaces out the CALEA interface.
We could see this coming from quite a ways back in the 90’s. From what I know of how we were forced by the FBI/DOJ to put in interception interfaces into routers and the technical details of those interfaces, coupled with what I know from back-of-the envelope calculations and the disingenuous lies and prevarication of the people who have been caught in bald-faced lies, about the only question I have left for NSA employees is how many times a shift they’re jerking off while listening to those seedy dial-a-porn calls advertised on late-night cable TV.
So if you have some solid evidence, Snowden or otherwise, lets hear it.
Such an effort would require not only the ability to intercept but as well store the data, it would require a MASSIVE Data Center.
NSA has already admitted the ability to intercept ALL. Nothing to worry about unless there is evidence of a MASSIVE Data Center in the works.
TRUST does not limit government, physical limits do.