
Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government? - glaugh
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephone-calls-recorded-fbi-boston
======
acabal
I've said it before and I'll say it again: anonymity online and encrypted
communications are one of the most important problems we're going to going to
face in the coming decades. Hackers should be working on those, not clever
ways to serve ads or geolocating your latest locally-sourced coffee.

If you don't believe the US is already permanently archiving vast swaths of
communication, it's not a big leap of imagination to picture it happening in
five or ten years. Likewise the government might not have the computer power
to _analyze_ those archives _today_ , but in five or ten years, I'd bet on it.

Some people don't mind that the government stores their emails. "I'm fine with
it because I know they're going to catch the bad guys" or "I'm fine with it
because I have nothing to hide". Those are certainly powerful (though flawed)
arguments for the situation _today_. Those people are perhaps picturing filing
cabinets in some dank warehouse filled with paper printouts of their emails,
which due to space constraints will be shredded or forgotten in ten years. The
reality is that thanks to technology, what we say today is being stored and
archived _for-ev-er_ and can be indexed and retrieved _easily and
indefinitely_. Why does that make a difference? Because _today_ , what you say
and do might be lawful. But laws and societies change over time, and the
government will still be able to go back and dig up what you said decades ago
and use it against you.

That's really what scares me--because today, I, like most people, don't have
much to hide. But who knows what laws or culture will be like in 20 years, and
what can be used against me that I said so very long ago? Can you imagine
working at the WTC and having a bad day, and jokingly sending an email to a
coworker about bombing the place because you're so mad. 9/11 happens a year
later, the government looks in its archives for the email you sent, and in a
post-9/11 frenzy sends you to Guantanamo to "await trial". Or it doesn't even
have to go that far; some government spokesperson lets your name slip in an
interview as a "suspect" and the media attention you'll get will forever ruin
your life even if the government does nothing.

~~~
mpyne
> Or it doesn't even have to go that far; some government spokesperson lets
> your name slip in an interview as a "suspect" and the media attention you'll
> get will forever ruin your life even if the government does nothing.

Unless the government gets out of the business of handling birth certificates,
driver's licenses, etc. they're simply going to have your name.

Secure communications channels is certainly an important topic though, but
given what happened to Sunil Tripathi in the aftermath of the Reddit swarm to
find the Boston Marathom bomber(s), perhaps it's possible that your biggest
"online threat" in the future won't be part of the government at all.

You get the wrong Google, Facebook, or random datacenter sysadmin upset and
you could find yourself in hot water with even less of a legal recourse. It's
just as easy to imagine roving bands of vigilantes in that dystopian future as
it is to imagine Big Brother, is it not?

I get why this (COMSEC) is an important problem; what I don't get is why so
many otherwise very intelligent persons focus on the government as the sole
problem area. The government is mostly staffed by either those who are
actually idealistic, or those who are too incompetent to hack it in the
private sector. Certainly Google and Facebook have better IT infrastructure
than 99% of the government.

P.S. The U.S. Constitution forbids "ex post facto" laws that make previously
legal behavior illegal after-the-fact. If you believe that the Constitution
actually means anything you shouldn't worry about currently legal things being
held against you in 20 years. If you believe the Constitution won't hold up in
20 years then it's kind of pointless to worry about any of the other laws,
they'd be just as shredded.

~~~
monkeyspaw
It wasn't too long ago that the US had the HUAC committee, and ruined many
people's reputations by digging up what they'd said in the past.

~~~
eupharis
Using something said in the past to embarrass in the present is one thing. It
is often justified, like with "mission accomplished" or the "the fundamentals
of the economy are strong."

Prosecuting for something that was legally done in the past is a whole
different issue.

~~~
monkeyspaw
Government sponsored embarrassment isn't the same as putting someone in jail,
you are right.

However, taking away someone's ability to make a living (see the Hollywood
blacklist, etc.) is leverage that can be used to control behavior. The HUAC
hearings were a big bad thing that was done. It wasn't as bad as slavery, for
example, but it is something that happened very recently and I think we want
to avoid.

~~~
eupharis
/nod

------
moxie
My recollection of the NSA's legal interpretation is that they feel they don't
need a warrant to record everyone's traffic; they only need a warrant for a
human to subsequently access those recordings.

The twist this puts on "having nothing to hide" is that it means you have to
trust everything you say now will _forever_ be considered benign, rather than
just at this particular moment in history.

Open Whisper Systems is a project I work on to help untap your phone:
<http://www.whispersystems.org>

~~~
rayiner
It's not a completely ridiculous legal interpretation. The 4th amendment is
implemented via the exclusionary rule, which excludes evidence from a court
case obtained from an unreasonable search. As a matter of history and practice
(the exclusionary rule predates the Constitution), the 4th amendment is in
many ways a rule governing criminal procedure more than it is a privacy rule
per se.

Now, today the prevailing view is that the 4th amendment is that illegal
searches are unconstitutional even if the exclusionary rule can't be invoked
(see, Bivens v. Six Unknown Named FBI Agents), but there is still this contour
in the law that distinguishes collecting data from trying to bring it into
evidence.

The argument here is probably wrong, but not ridiculous.

~~~
moxie
To be clear, I don't actually think it's worth trying to influence what is or
isn't the legal interpretation that we might desire.

We can't _blame_ power for establishing systems of control, just as we can't
_blame_ a tiger for mauling a zoo keeper: it's the nature of the thing. It's
what we should expect, no matter how much time we spend coaxing or training
it.

I'd much rather invest energy into developing solutions that allow us to
communicate securely, rather than investing energy into asking those with
power not to monitor our insecure communication.

~~~
flogic
The critical difference is one is a tiger with limited reasoning ability and
the other is a human being. So, I can and should be pissed at people in power
when they overstep their bounds.

~~~
gojomo
And this being "pissed" achieves what exactly? Does your level of pissitude
work as leverage to affect the reasoned-out behavior of these other human
beings? If so, through what mechanism?

~~~
flogic
Being pissed leads to me donating money to the ACLU, voting, and voicing my
opinions.

~~~
mtowle
One of those might do something.

~~~
bubblelamp
It's asinine to suggest that we remove vocal outrage from our political
dialog. It is one of the finest tools of change. Just look at all the faux
outrage over "high unemployment" under Bush 43 (average of around 5%), and
compare it to the lack of outrage in today's economy. No, I think outrage is
not something I'll give up to please supposedly enlightened people like
yourself.

------
danbruc
The first question that comes to my mind - is this technically and
economically possible?

How many minutes does the average person spend on the phone per day? I found
some numbers in the range from 6 to 28 minutes per day. Let's just pick 15
minutes. This times the population of the states (313.9 million) divided by
two yields 39,237,500 hours per day. Storing this at 8 kbps requires about
128.5 TiB per day or 45.8 PiB per year.

At $40 per TiB this is less than 2 million dollars per year. So technically
and economically this should actually be possible. But that is just storing.
Performing speech recognition, analyzing the data and extracting information
is probably the much harder task and I would guess that it is still infeasible
to do this with all phone calls.

~~~
fchollet
No doubt that intelligent processing on that scale will be feasible in time,
and most likely soon. Opinion surveillance at the scale of a nation is too
strategically important.

And when it will start happening, it will also apply to today's data.

~~~
hayksaakian
> And when it will start happening, it will also apply to today's data.

I hope everyone else noticed this as well.

Even if the tech to do crazy analysis does not exist today, the tech to record
all the data for future use is quite real.

~~~
sliverstorm
Well, the statute of limitations hasn't changed, so just cross your fingers
the march of technology isn't _too_ fast... ;)

------
jrockway
I kind of doubt that they have every phone conversation recorded and archived
for all time. But I'm not sure what exactly the incentive is to tell people
that they do. If they said, "no, we can't get any of that", it would encourage
criminals to be sloppy (and us citizens to not scrutinize them too much). But
they say, "yeah, we have everything", which encourages the criminals to use
strong cryptography. (And if they've broken AES, they're probably not going to
publicly reveal that to our enemies by using it against you in your drug
possession case.)

It just doesn't make much sense.

------
joshuahedlund
If the government is already recording everything, why do they have to reach
out and reprogram cards to get access to specific people? [1] I think the
illegal things the government does to get more access is evidence they don't
have total access at this time.

[1] [http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/verizon-
rigmaiden-a...](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/verizon-rigmaiden-
aircard)

~~~
6d0debc071
That just shows that the FBI don't have access to everything all the time,
which is probably true. I've worked for groups before where you'd know that
someone else in the same group had the data you were interested in but it was
less bother to go and get it yourself than it was to make a freedom of
information request and wait a month for that to process.

One of the few advantages that smaller groups have against big systems is that
big systems don't totally trust other people in their own systems. Even the
police classify their information hierarchically - maybe this bit of
information only needs to be known by inspectors in firearms units, etc ,etc.

~~~
dwiel
Just because they ask for access doesn't mean they don't already have it. It
just means they haven't collected it in a way that can be used in a court
case.

------
Gravityloss
If it is happening, it might some day be culturally accepted. There are steps
after that. Are you allowed access to your own history? One big business
aspect of gmail is that - easy searchability of your whole email history. It
will contain stuff written by other people as well. Will there be some policy
of email expiration?

In the end we get to something like in science fiction. Hannu Rajaniemi's
Quantum Thief has externalized common memory and also your private memories
that can be recovered. Also pieces of them that can be shared directly. Such
centralized systems have a whole host of new security problems.

------
beachstartup
my first thought was, "what's a recording?"

is buffering packets in a network device a recording? using metadata for
traffic/performance analysis?

------
SeanDav
Probably voicing an opinion in this thread might get you investigated at some
point in the future....

~~~
mindcrime
In that case, let me be the first to say:

Dear CIA, FBI, NSA, DIA, DHS, TSA, etc:

Fuck you.

Thanks,

Mindcrime

I don't give a shit if they investigate me or not. One can't live one's entire
life in fear, damnit. Either principles mean something and we need to stand up
for and defend them, or not.

------
InternalRun
This thing is always coming up, will someone show me some actual evidence and
I am not talking some crack pot agent turned whistle blower saying "THAT DO
THIS AND THAT", not ECHELON and not the base they are building. I am talking
evidence. Logging every single thing? Everything? The data storage that would
be required for that is insane. All of these "whistle blowers" have something
in common, they are making money off of this, from books to interviews. I am
not about to trust them any more than I am their previous employers. Why is it
I am ment to question everything the US does but I am ment to blindly trust
anyone who says they are doing something like this?

~~~
coldtea
There has been publicised information (by major news outlets) that points to
this for a long time. And Echelon is also not some crackpot's dream. What's to
doubt? Even the CIA CTO said at some point that the "record everything they
can and keep it forever":

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/cia-gus-hunt-big-
da...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/20/cia-gus-hunt-big-
data_n_2917842.html)

The CIA Chief Tech Officer. What more proof do you need? As if they're gonna
let you have a peak at their data centers! If you don't believe they do it at
whatever scale it's possible at this point, then you're delusional.

And, no, "The data storage that would be required for that" (logging every
call) is not insane by any means. Even a medium-sized corporation could afford
it nowadays, and we're talking about the government here.

------
pwnna
Are skype calls being recorded now too? They had pretty good security until
recently. The independent security review they posted on their site is like..
8 years old now.

------
gwgarry
The more data they have the less they know. Most people with extreme voiced
opinions will do nothing. Thinking doesn't mean doing and doing doesn't mean
thinking.

~~~
b6
The problem is that if you ever cross them, they have over 10 years worth of
every type of your electronic communications to sift through for dirt. Not
only do they have all that on you, which gives them some unknown but extremely
worrisome level of insight about you, but also on all your friends and family
and colleagues. And the likelihood of crossing them keeps growing.

~~~
gwgarry
Well I don't deal with them... so I don't care. They don't have to worry about
me crossing them.

~~~
dalke
The point is that you do deal with them, you just don't know about it. You
also have to factor in the odds that there will be a false positive affecting
you.

Your name might be on a no-fly list, even though you aren't "crossing them."
There might be "100% verified" data which links you to some event, as there
was with Brandon Mayfield's fingerprints, even though that connection is 100%
wrong.

These are all low-probability events. Odds are, you don't have to worry. But
every time you have to wait in line for security screening, remember that it's
a false positive because they are worrying about you crossing them.

~~~
gwgarry
And that's why I have not traveled in years. You're going to harass me, I am
not going to play. It's going to hurt the economy, but that's your fault, not
mine.

~~~
djKianoosh
but then you're not really free are you? free in the sense that you self-
impose restrictions on travel. do you feel free? (honest question, cause your
stance is intriguing)

