
NSA Recommends Dropping Phone-Surveillance Program - bonyt
https://bgr.com/2019/04/24/nsa-phone-surveillance-spying-program/
======
ddelt
Personally, the skeptic in me believes if the NSA is losing interest in a
major data collection program like this, then they are deflecting the
narrative from focusing on an even more impressive and accurate data
collection program that they have developed and are ready to deploy out into
the world. I’m putting on my tinfoil hat at this point, but every day I read
HN I’m surprised at what is capable, given the right technology, money, and
time.

~~~
fooey
I think it's more likely that most everyone the NSA would be interested in
snooping on is aware they're snooping and has changed how they communicate and
moved to encryption.

The signal to noise ratio has to be completely ridiculous, to the point that
it's no longer a justifiable effort.

~~~
closeparen
Miranda warnings have been pop culture for decades, yet criminals keep
confessing in interview rooms.

Threats to public safety tend not to be firing on all cylinders, thankfully.

~~~
wallace_f
I don't think it's that simple.

Intimidation and coercion are powerful motivators. The Innocence Project found
25% of people proven innocent, by DNA evidence, actually provided confessions
or self-incriminating statements.

I worry about what other behind-the-door tactics are used. Some might even be
official abuses of power, such as gag orders, which are already being used for
what the WSJ called "political persecutions in Wisconsin,"(1) it wouldn't
surprise me.

>Threats to public safety

This is what I'm worried about here.

0-[https://www.innocencecanada.com/causes-of-wrongful-
convictio...](https://www.innocencecanada.com/causes-of-wrongful-convictions/)

1-[https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/04/wisonsins-shame-i-
tho...](https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/04/wisonsins-shame-i-thought-it-
was-home-invasion-david-french/)

~~~
cosmodisk
Get an average person into a room, interrogate for hour or days,if necessary,
and ultimately, the vast majority would confess to anything just for the sake
of ending it. There are many tricks in a hat to do so+ decades of experience
within police and other institutions.

------
pdimitar
And we should believe the word of an agency that broke it many times before
and actively tried to sabotage encryption, because?...

~~~
liquidise
This damned-if-they-do sentiment risks dismissing positive policy moves. If
this headline read "NSA is expanding surveillance programs" people would be up
in arms over the privacy implications. Instead they announce that they believe
it should be dismantled and the response is... the same?

I understand the hesitation. Outright dismissing positive change feels like a
counter-productive stance to adopt.

~~~
JasonFruit
I understand why you say this, but even if they're truly doing the right thing
here, I only owe them gratitude enough to say, "Thanks for stopping spying on
me, finally, at least in this way." Add that to the number of times the NSA
has shown itself to be untrustworthy and intentionally deceptive, and I'm
willing to seem ungrateful and hard to satisfy. They've cultivated a hostile
relationship, toward fixing which this is at best a small step.

~~~
netwanderer3
They could be invasive, by monitoring even when there's nothing going on, but
there are well-defined rules and strict protocols in place, and I have never
heard any cases where they have used the data to attack anyone personally or
are there?

~~~
ibeckermayer
I never consented to have my data snooped on by some cabal of creeps out in
Washington DC. If they suspect I’m up to something, then show sufficient
evidence to get a warrant and be transparent about it. Whether they’ve acted
on the data or not is irrelevant — they’re stealing what should be my property
and building tools for tyranny.

------
nocturnial
I wonder if recruitment was also a factor in making this decision. Recently
they released ghidra which they admitted was mainly for recruitment purposes.
If it's because of this, then it makes sense it's not worth it. Collecting
massive amounts of (mostly useless) data versus attracting talented people. I
know it's not a black or white situation and they can still attract talented
people, but if there's a negative perception of the NSA then the pool of
people will be a lot less.

~~~
holyend
The rumor is that recruitment absolutely was affected after Snowden. More
damage done to our country by him.

I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he did put the full cache of files
online before fleeing, to be able to sell them to Russia. He certainly had the
capability to do so. Also, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he was
involved with Vault 7 somehow; it’s another conspiracy theory floating around.

Unclear why this is being downvoted.

~~~
screye
Is it damage?

He exposed the job for what it was and concensious citizens decided that it
wasn't a purpose they wanted to fight for. Much better than working on the
Manhattan project thinking it would be used for nuclear energy, only to then
see your creation be used for mass destruction.

Is whistle blowers exposing rampant abuse in the church doing damage to the
good of Christianity too?

The citizens deserve to know about the scale on which their own government
violates their privacy.

Snowden is no Assange.

~~~
holyend
Yes, it’s damage. He torched the NSA to the ground. Comparison to a church
doesn’t make sense.

------
basetop
In other words, the NSA found a better way of snooping. If they are asking to
drop phone surveillance, then they found a superior method of data collection.

~~~
nocturnial
If they've found a better way of snooping then why announce it to the world
instead of silently dropping the program?

This sounds more like a public relations move instead of a technically
inspired one.

~~~
mrobot
PR, i agree.

------
mnm1
The only conclusion is that the NSA simply cannot be trusted in the future.
I'm sure our illogical lawmakers will not draw it, but this is clearly another
case of being told this program was crucial and people's rights needed to be
trampled on that was simply untrue. The NSA just wanted the power for powers
sake. Lawmakers should stop giving this agency what it asks for as it clearly
has no bounds or idea of what it's doing with the incredible power it has.

~~~
archgoon
Not necessarily; it may have been a very important source that has dried up or
has been superseded by alternatives.

The phone program was launched prior to the iPhone and Facebook (even though
we only found out about it after both). It may well have been very important
up to at least 2012 (6 years into Facebook, 3 into the iPhone/ android boom)
when we learned about the program and the NSA defended it.

Since the revelation seven years ago, it could well be that targets of the NSA
are no longer using communication channels where phone metadata is useful.

------
clubm8
Meanwhile in England:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora)

And Utah:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center#Purpose](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center#Purpose)

~~~
walrus01
From a purely technical perspective, the bespoke equipment needed to buffer
and search through the traffic flow of a single 100Gbps transatlantic DWDM
circuit (of which there might be 40 or 80 possible circuits in a single cable,
from Porthcurnow to NY/NJ) would be incredibly complicated and costly. Just
the amount of RAM you would need is nuts.

Or to do the same as a passive intercept on a 100Gbps PNI between two ISPs at
Telehouse Docklands.

~~~
late2part
No, it's not.

Gigamon can easily tap 100G and deconstruct it into 10x10G flows.

[https://www.gigamon.com/company/news-and-
events/newsroom/gig...](https://www.gigamon.com/company/news-and-
events/newsroom/gigamon-brings-performance-visibility-100gb-networks.html)

An off the shelf server can line rate tap/filter 10g.

gigamon might cost $50k? Each server might cost $5k? $100k to monitor a 100g
circuit? Peanuts.

~~~
jauer
You are talking about one 100G circuit and the relatively minor sever+tap
costs.

Summary of metadata might be possible if they have a small number of selectors
pushed out to the edge, but given the footprint of a FAANG backbone and edge
pops, keeping up with them would be noticeable, if only for impact on fiber
and real-estate markets.

People keep talking about NSA's Utah DC like it's something huge, but in the
scheme of scale out operators it's pretty average...

~~~
late2part
Yep. I suspect we agree more than we disagree.

You are aware that every cable landing station has a classified area, right?
And noone is allowed to visit a landing station w/out clearance from USG? And
that the USG has a large data center near every cable landing station with
rights to use the backhaul fiber from the landing station?

Ask Jay or Najam if they think the USG was tapping FB before they started
encrypting everything.

There's on the order of 100 transoceanic cables terminating in the US with on
the order of 80 lambdas per cables. That's 8k 100gs at $100k each, or $800M.
That's less than 1% of NSA budget and about a tenth of 1% of the black budget.
It's a relatively low cost to ensure "total information awareness" of comms
in/out of the US.

I don't suggest that 100% of this being stored. It is a fairly trivial
computer science problem w/ today's solutions to real time scan the words and
pull out flagged data for analysis. That's the metadata you mention and I
agree.

~~~
walrus01
> And noone is allowed to visit a landing station w/out clearance from USG?

I work on a regular basis with people at ISPs who operate the terrestrial dark
fiber and DWDM networks into many of the WA, OR and CA cable landing stations,
and none of them have ever been required to get special permission from the
feds. Most have gone through ordinary background checks through their
employers, for basic stuff (way, way less involved than doing an SF-86 for a
Secret clearance, basically just credit checks, criminal record check, and
calling this previous references on their CV when they're hired).

------
z3t4
All they really need is metadata, IP-addresses, then they can use network
theory to build graphs that shows who is communicating with who. If you for
example visit a "terrorist" web site you are now linked to everyone else who
also visited that site. Using network mesh graphs they can discover new
"terrorist" cells. They can even figure out who the leader of this "terrorist"
cell is and effectively destroy the cell. I can imagine they are also tracking
location data to see who meets physically.

------
danboarder
Are the budgets for these programs public knowledge? How much money have we
(taxpayers) spent (or wasted?) on these "tools"? And for historians, will we
ever get to see the source code and details of how they worked (other than
powerpoint documents leaked by Snowden..)?

~~~
tlrobinson
This particular program, or the whole shebang?

It looks like the NSA got about $11B of the "Black Budget" in 2013
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/special/national/black...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/special/national/black-budget/) It's further broken down on that page.

------
OrgNet
We can't trust what they say but either way, most phone traffic is probably
VOIP nowadays (not traditional phone, so that program is probably
obsolete?)...

------
dang
We changed the URL from [https://www.wsj.com/articles/nsa-recommends-dropping-
phone-s...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/nsa-recommends-dropping-phone-
surveillance-program-11556138247) because WSJ seems no longer to have a
paywall workaround. If someone can suggest a better URL, we can change it
again. I just did a Google and picked the first link I found that wasn't
illegibly crammed with ads.

~~~
mzs
This works (even without the bypass paywalls extension) in a firefox private
window:

[https://m.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https://www.wsj.com/artic...](https://m.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/nsa-
recommends-dropping-phone-surveillance-program-11556138247?mod=rsswn)

I guess what I'm saying is that HN should not penalize the company doing the
journalism. People can buy a subscription, those that won't still have a
technical solution, and for the rest they can google like you did and find an
article to read among the blogspam.

~~~
dang
There's simply no good solution here, short of the publishing business
restructuring so we can pay once to read everything, which I hope I live to
see.

In the meantime, we have a clear if sucky policy, described at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989),
with plenty more explanation at
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang%20paywall&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix&page=0).
It is the way it is not because we or anyone else likes it, but because the
alternatives would suck worse.

~~~
mzs
WSJ is not a hard paywall+, it has multiple technical solutions similar to
what was allowed before, open these in a private window for example:

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-yale-dad-who-set-off-the-
co...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-yale-dad-who-set-off-the-college-
admissions-scandal-11552588402?mod=rsswn)

[https://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/th...](https://facebook.com/l.php?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-
autism-diagnosis-that-isnt-always-permanent-11553526845?mod=rsswn)

[https://m.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https://www.wsj.com/artic...](https://m.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-
violated-qualcomm-patent-u-s-trade-judge-rules-11553624866?mod=rsswn)

Notice that "?mod=rsswn" is used as described in this issue^ for a browser
extension which can be used for a number of sites.

I'll try all these after I click reply and edit if it does not work.

\+
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19496356#19506786](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19496356#19506786)

^ [https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-
firefox/issues...](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-
firefox/issues/120)

edit: All worked though an ad appeared over the article that I was able to
dismiss by clicking on the small x in the upper right of the ad itself. Then I
was able to read all those articles without being logged-in to the WSJ, just
like readers of HNs could before.

------
Rapzid
I wonder if they realized this back when they lied to congress and tried to
take credit for FBI work when they couldn't come up with "a single instance in
which analysis of the NSA’s bulk collection metadata collection actually
stopped an imminent attack, or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any
objective that was time-sensitive in nature". It's always interesting when
something crazy is going on and you would think the NSA would have relevant
information to help, but they don't.

I suppose six years is enough time to save some face from the 2013 fiasco?

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
The intelligence agencies used to try to find out a persons skills and
experience. Now they jest check their LinkedIn profile. They used to try to
find who their friends and associates were. Now they check their Facebook
friends. They used to try to figure out where the person travels on their day
to day routine. Now they can check your Google Maps location history. Instead
of going through great expenses to try to do surveillance on individual
phones, they should just focus on how to get that data from these American
companies that already have them.

~~~
maxheadroom
> _...they should just focus on how to get that data from these American
> companies that already have them._

...but they were already in their bases, killing their doodz[0], yeah? Why
would they focus on something they already had on-hand?

[0] - [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-
giants...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-
data)

------
kerng
I'd assume they have now other means to get what they want.

------
thestartup
For the life of me, I cannot figure out why this comment by "holyend" is being
silently ghosted (censored) / flagged. Can a moderator explain the reasoning
for it being flagged? Are curse words disallowed?

[https://ibb.co/f9gVV3Q](https://ibb.co/f9gVV3Q)

I'm assuming this comment will also be ghosted/flagged; if so, requesting a
reason please.

------
jgalt212
I heard they are dropping this because they can get all the data they need
from FB's new data partner program. /s

------
tempodox
Surprise: The NSA was lying. Not only in the details of what they were saying
but also in taking what looked like a most definitive stance on a topic they
couldn't know enough about.

------
metters
This only includes the cellphones of American citizens, doesnt it?

------
deytempo
They already have enough data to build the rest of it

------
tracker1
For clarification on my previous response... I mean it's a probably a good
thing for the program to be stopped

------
xchip
No need to intercept cellphone communications because they already have all in
Facebook and whatsapp

------
9935c101ab17a66
Just an FYI to people trying to view this article, the usual tricks like
facebook outlinking, using outline.com and setting google as a referrer didn't
work to circumvent the paywall. But I did manage to view the article by
changing my user-agent to Safari - iOS. Dunno why it works but ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯.

EDIT: I take it back. This briefly worked, but doesn't anymore. I have no idea
what changed. Sorry peeps.

~~~
heavymark
What specific version. In Safari on Mac, you can set the user agent in the
Develop menu, to iOS iPhone, iPad, etc. Tried them all and no luck. Is there a
specific iOS Device/iOS version you set to to be able to view the article?

~~~
9935c101ab17a66
Super weird, this worked once and no longer works, I have no idea what
changed. Sorry.

------
HocusLocus
ONCE AGAIN, they're clutching at their pearls and swooning about losing the
(straw man) metadata. They think we're stoopid. Required reading,

NSA Surveillance: Exploring the Geographies of Internet Interception

Andrew Clement

Faculty of Information, University of Toronto

[https://archive.org/download/GeographiesOfInternetIntercepti...](https://archive.org/download/GeographiesOfInternetInterceptionAndrewClement/geographies%20of%20internet%20interception%20andrew%20clement.PDF)

Might be a mix of hearsay but some pieces of the puzzle are becoming clearer.
Skip to the section on 'NSA Splitters' and ask yourself, if they had drop-in
access to the baseband circuits, qould they already be able to intercept the
Telcom providers' streams that gather the data that is now part of the
disclosure programs? And even if the links are encrypted, keys can be leaked.
Telcos are finally 'off the hook'.

------
dang
Url changed from [https://www.wsj.com/articles/nsa-recommends-dropping-
phone-s...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/nsa-recommends-dropping-phone-
surveillance-program-11556138247), which points to this.

~~~
mzs
this extension* still works for me for that WSJ URL (right-click 'open link in
igcognito window')

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19744632](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19744632)

