
NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls (2006) - danial
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm
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codeulike
Its interesting that much less fuss was made about basically the same story
back then. Why the difference? Perhaps:

(1) the definite proof was missing, it was just 'a source' said something

(2) in 2006, it was G W Bush, so people weren't that surprised

(3) it was just 5 years since 9-11 so people accepted it more easily

(4) it was before everyone understood the geo-data that phone calls include

(5) General public (beyond IT professionals) have a better understanding of
data and privacy now, after years of facebook and targeted ads

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bschlinker
Less fuss? I remember plenty of talk going on about this -- it hit the front
page of many newspapers including the NYT and the Washington Post. The
administration even acknowledged it to a degree. People have just forgotten.

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taf2
And they will forget again, because just as before it's not being abused.

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return0
Why not anonymize the data and make a hackathon (the goal being to identify
potential terrorists? i don't know)? Why not give it back to the taxpayers who
paid for its collection? I know two wrongs don't make a right, but maybe
something good could come out of this.

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LowKarmaAccount
The data that the NSA is valuable precisely because it isn't anonymous. You
can't make any worthwhile statistical discoveries with truly anonymous data
because you don't really know what you are measuring. Any information that
they don't strip before releasing it (which they won't) could be traced back
to a certain person or organization that the metadata is about.

The Boston bombers weren't caught because of cellphone data. They were caught
because they engaged the police in a gunfight; one of the brothers escaped,
and he was caught because a man reported that his boat had a blood trail on
it.

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kahirsch
They actually were tracked by the cell phone of the man whose car they
hijacked. Obviously, this was only a small part of the story and isn't the
same kind of cellphone data.

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Zigurd
The NSA may have had such a database for a very long time indeed. The earliest
documents I can find mentioning Dayton go back to 1994, but I think I recall
hearing about Daytona much earlier.

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dm2
Considering that FISA was passed in 1978 and that the NSA has been around
since the 1950s, I would assume that domestic wiretapping has been going on
the entire time. They absolutely have to say publicly that they are not
recording any US citizens data, but year after year there are leaks that say
otherwise.

Maybe 98% of NSA employees were required to not intercept any US citizen
transmissions but there has likely always been a division of the NSA that is
devoted to domestic spying. The agency would be completely ineffective if they
didn't allow recording domestic communications.

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arikrak
Since the phone story isn't news, how do they manage to make a such a big deal
out of it?

