
NSA Collects 'Word for Word' Every Domestic Communication, Says Former Analyst - chakalakasp
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/july-dec13/whistleblowers_08-01.html
======
martindale
The "former analyst" in question is Russell Tice, who was terminated by the
NSA in 2005 after "publicly urging Congress to pass stronger protections for
federal intelligence agency whistleblowers facing retaliation" [1]. There's an
interesting exchange from then-director of NSA special access programs Renee
Seymour to Tice warning him against testifying on the NSA programs [2] about a
half year later.

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice#Whistleblower](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice#Whistleblower)
[2]:
[http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2006/04/nsa010906.pdf](http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2006/04/nsa010906.pdf)

~~~
twoodfin
That letter seems eminently reasonable to me.

~~~
martindale
I agree. It's interesting from a historical context.

------
fixxer
Nice to see somebody pointing out the obvious bullshit regarding the Utah
facility's real purpose (content storage, not metadata).

What kind of iron do you need to run NLP on a day's worth of content (let's
limit "content" to voice transcriptions from phone calls)? Suppose I want to
pick out "bomb" in near real-time? How many $billions for total information
awareness?

Even the best algo is going to produce false positives. At nation scale, that
is going to be a massive QA/QC effort.

~~~
clicks
I'm curious about the storage media they might have... is it just plain old
rotational harddrives? Who made them -- Seagate? Western Digital? It's curious
that no word has come out from that front -- "wow, this customer is requesting
a _LOT_ of storage devices... like, more storage space than what is available
in the world".

And really, because of this I think the idea that they might have some in-
house innovation is not so far-fetched. We started hearing a lot about inPhase
Technologies and such about DVD-sized discs that could store upwards of 6
terabytes back almost 10 years ago, but it amounted mostly to vapourware. We
do now have confirmed information from Seagate that they'll start shipping out
laptop-sized 2.5" rotational drives that will be able to store around ~60 TB
of data within the next 2-3 years. Perhaps NSA has been secretively working
with them, if not just producing the devices for themselves?

~~~
MichaelGG
Uncompressed, 1 hour of phone audio is only ~29MB (8KB/sec*3600s/h).
Compressing it for storage can send that way down. Let's assume to 6MB. If
every 300M Americans talked for an hour a day, that's only 2TB a day for call
audio.

Edit: That's only one-way, so double. But compression can eliminate most of
that, as there's usually only audio on one side of a call at a time. Anyways,
even if I'm right within a factor of 10 or so, it doesn't really seem like a
suspiciously high volume of disks.

(Disclaimer: I'm very drowsy just been woken up due to a datacenter coolant
failure so maybe I miscalculated it.)

~~~
panarky
You're off by three orders of magnitude.

6 MB * 300 million = 1716 TB

~~~
xSwag
You're right, but that's only the calls one way. It should really be times by
2.

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=6+MB+*+300+million](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=6+MB+*+300+million)

~~~
MichaelGG
See my comment about two-way. It wouldn't matter much as it's rare that both
parties are speaking at the same time.

It's also possible that the compression techniques for long-term storage are
vastly superior to realtime codecs. The lowest realtime voice codecs are
300-600 bits per second (they sound like shit), which is 213x compression (so
an hour would be under a a meg).

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=600bps*1h*300000000](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=600bps*1h*300000000)

81TB a day. Again, this is assuming one hour of calls for 300 million people.

I did a quick search and found this snippet: "A telephia survey said that
Americans average 13 talking hours a month – with the 18-24 age group
averaging 22 hours."[1]

So that is under half an hour a day average. So, let's assume 300bps (lowest
realtime voice codec I'm aware of), half hour a day, I'll stick to 300M people
and we get:

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=300bps*30minutes*300000...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=300bps*30minutes*300000000)

20TB.

So maybe I was only an order of magnitude off. Still pretty sloppy of me.

1: [http://www.accuconference.com/blog/Cell-Phone-
Statistics.asp...](http://www.accuconference.com/blog/Cell-Phone-
Statistics.aspx)

------
espeed
Reposting this from a previous thread
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5897654](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5897654))...

I remember during the Boston bombing investigation, Tim Clemente, a former FBI
counter-terrorism agent, told Erin Burnett on CNN that they could go back and
get access to the content of the calls between the deceased bomber and his
wife, Katherine Russell.

After some Googling, I found a partial transcript of the CNN interview...

"Almost immediately Erin Burnett, the host of CNN's Outfront, wanted to know
how the government knew. Aren't phone calls supposed to be private? She
interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent on May 1,
asking:"

    
    
      Is there any way … they [the federal investigators] can
      try to get the phone companies to give that up … It’s not
      a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There’s no way
      they can actually find out what [was said on the call],
      right, unless she tells them?
    
      Clemente:  There is a way. We certainly have ways in
      national security investigations to find out exactly what
      was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily
      something that the FBI is going to want to present in
      court, but it may help lead the investigation … we 
      certainly can find that out.
    
      Burnett: So they can actually get that? … that is  
      incredible.
    
      Clemente: Welcome to America. All of that stuff is being 
      captured as we speak, whether we know it or like it, or 
      not. 
    

Source:
[http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15340-boston...](http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/15340-boston-
bombing-investigation-reveals-government-surveillance-of-phone-calls)

CNN Interview Clip
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPHZrVPt4-U](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPHZrVPt4-U))

CNN Follow-Up Interview
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt9kRLrmrjc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt9kRLrmrjc))

When I initially saw this on CNN, my first thought was, do they also have
access to all photos and videos that are taken and transmitted online?

And if so, couldn't they stitch together a multi-angle montage from all the
photos and videos taken at the scene of the Boston bombing (like
[http://photosynth.net](http://photosynth.net)), rather than asking everyone
to manually scour through their personal footage?

~~~
espeed
Here's a question I've been pondering: Did the NSA want PRISM to leak?

Having everyone in the world know that someone is watching will have
significant sociological effects. It is akin to the idea that "God is
watching".

Thousands of years ago the fear of God and promise of reward was the carrot
and stick that resulted in people working together for the greater good rather
than pursuing self interest. It was the invisible hand. Those that united and
cooperated survived and evolved, and those that refused to unite died off.

Jonathan Haidt has been talking
([http://www.ted.com/speakers/jonathan_haidt.html](http://www.ted.com/speakers/jonathan_haidt.html))
and writing ([http://www.amazon.com/Jonathan-
Haidt/e/B001H6GAXW](http://www.amazon.com/Jonathan-Haidt/e/B001H6GAXW)) about
how this was key to and accelerated civilization's evolution -- "it put
everyone in the same boat."

This same phenomenon happens at the cellular level -- bacteria group to form
mitochondria, and mitochondria to form cells, and so on, each time forming a
superorganism ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-
organization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organization)).

E pluribus unum
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_pluribus_unum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E_pluribus_unum))
-- "out of many, one."

Ants, wasps, and bees are the canonical example of this, and the beehive is
often used to symbolize this concept
([https://www.google.com/search?q=beehive+symbolism&newwindow=...](https://www.google.com/search?q=beehive+symbolism&newwindow=1&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X)).
The PRISM name even reflects the symbology -- a honeycomb is made up of prisms
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeycomb](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeycomb),
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_prismatic_honeycomb](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_prismatic_honeycomb)).

For the last few hundred years, market forces have been the invible hand
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand)),
and the corporation emerged as the superorganism. But overtime entropy
increases and order erodes. Maybe PRISM is an attempt to reestablish order.

The NSA may see other benefits from PRISM leaking. For example, mining the
world's communication data may or may not be practical today, but observing a
system changes a system.

How will people's behavior change now that they know they're being watched? It
would be easier to detect deltas than to mine the entire system. Turn on the
lights. Roaches scatter. Targets reveal.

~~~
logn
I've also wondered if perhaps Snowden is still on CIA payroll. Maybe the NSA
didn't want this leaked but CIA did.

~~~
cracell
It's very interesting to think about if Snowden is actually a part of a larger
group and is just the front man for leaking what they want out there,
regardless of their motivation.

So far he's been presented as a lone wolf with assistance now from groups like
Wikileaks but acquiring data on his own and initiating things up himself. But
that may not be the case.

------
cheald
So here's my startup idea:

Stenographically-encoded messages in high-def porn. It's secure communications
with a built-in subscription model!

Porn accounts for a huge chunk of internet traffic today, and video doesn't
compress too well. Get enough people exchanging messages in porn videos and
all of a sudden, those listening in have a whole hell of a lot more bytes to
sift through.

(I'm only half joking.)

~~~
throwawaykf02
Real terrorists have already been using that for a long time. (For instance,
remember those media blurbs about lots of porn being found in the raid on bin
Laden?) As such I'd bet they have infrastructure in place to detect such
communications.

But in the same half-joking vein, some other problems:

1\. I recall reading that such stegonagraphically watermarked videos were
pretty easy to detect using simple statistical analysis of the noise in the
frames. With dedicated hardware for multimedia decoding cheaply and
ubiquitously available, frames can be efficiently extracted and the additional
number of bytes does little to slow them down. If the hidden data is
encrypted, well, you could just do that without the porn.

2\. Unless you make it as easy as tapping a key to start communicating, it
still does not remove a main barrier to widespread adoption of encryption,
which is inconvenience.

3\. The problem with porn is, people will just end up paying more attention to
the medium rather than the message.

~~~
ippisl
I read some research about provably secure steganography , which claim that if
you know the statistics of the communication channel, you can build secure
steno, at least to the level one way functions.

So it is interesting if in reality there is a stego detection tool.

www​.cs.umn.edu/~hopper/tc-stego.pdf

Btw one of the authors is Luis von ahn, the founder of duelingo, the language
teaching/translation app.

~~~
im3w1l
> if you know the statistics of the communication channel, you can build
> secure steno

That's a pretty big if though. I mean, if you miss one nuance the NSA didn't,
then your scheme could be toast. At least in the high data limit.

~~~
ippisl
You're right, that's a very big if.

Also, most of the research in the field has been done on black and white
image, so it not directly usefull.

And come to think on it, if we're talking about image stego, what prevents the
NSA from controlling the statistical distributions of output of cameras in
such a way that stego will be noticed(even after some image transforms) ?

~~~
IsThisObvious
Maybe the answer is to have a program that adds low scale random noise to as
many images as it can before upload to the internet.

It would be easy enough to make a one-click batch process, and would help
provide cover noise for real communication channels.

------
llamataboot
So it's now in the realm of maybe-to-probable that the NSA has every domestic
phone call on tape as well as some non-trivial sized chunk of all emails sent?
Plus for sure has all metadata they can get their hands on? Plus cable taps on
most (all?) internet backbones?

~~~
Sven7
Maybe SETI should try a SETI@NSA

~~~
spyder
Are you suggesting that NSA should wire-trap the aliens too? :)

~~~
Sven7
Obviously we need to know where the eggs are getting laid.

I mean before we cure cancer, figure out how the brain works and solve
inequality all the alien eggs must be found.

------
MattyRad
_> We have turned intelligence into a regulated industry in a way that none of
our allies, even in Europe, have done. We have all three branches of
government involved in overseeing the activities of the NSA..._

That a whistleblower had to reveal the programs, that Congress was largely
unaware that any such programs existed, and that NSA personnel are content
with lying to Congress about the programs pretty well contradicts that claim.
Still, glass half full, I suppose it's somewhat encouraging that PBS is
reporting on this.

------
205guy
Am I he only one who read that bit about wire-tapping the Supreme Court
judges? While unsurprising, that really seems to cross the line from counter-
whatever to political manipulation.

~~~
northwest
Absolutely. It's starting to play "God".

------
redsymbol
Holy crap:

 _RUSSELL TICE: ...The NSA were targeting individuals. In that case, they were
judges like the Supreme Court. I held in my hand Judge Alito 's targeting
information for his phones and his staff and his family._

If true, that's... mind boggling. What possible valid reason could the NSA
have to secretly monitor the calls of a US Supreme Court justice? And his
staff, AND family?

I really hope this allegation is false.

~~~
jboggan
I hope as well, but I doubt it. That kind of secret power begs to be abused.
The system of checks and balances that we learned about in civics class is
simply gone. A willful executive with these powers at hand can sway the
outcome of any congressional vote, any Supreme Court decision, or any media
story. Our immune system against tyranny has been compromised and irrevocably
so. We haven't yet descended into despotism but it is inevitable once a strong
enough individual rises. To carry the analogy further, it's 1984 and we've
just contracted HIV.

------
kennywinker
They throw out the claim (~4:10) the facility in utah could store "about 100
years of the world's communications".

Has anyone done the math? How much could that facility store. If they were
indeed recording word-for-word content, how many days/months/years could they
store?

~~~
er0k
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/07/24/blueprint...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2013/07/24/blueprints-
of-nsa-data-center-in-utah-suggest-its-storage-capacity-is-less-impressive-
than-thought/#comment-10697)

~~~
kennywinker
Very interesting. The tl;dr seems to be: nobody knows for sure, but yes... it
could totally be used for full content storage for some length of time.

~~~
acqq
No, it's not "nobody knows for sure." If you do the right math and don't
assume that they have the storage technology not available to the rest of the
world (which is a reasonable assumption) it's obvious that the data storage in
an accessible way inside that center has an upper bound of an order of around
one exabyte (1e18) (a million terabytes). So it's even more probable that it's
less, say 0.2 EB.

Now somebody here claims it's around 1e7 B compressed for an hour of phone
talk (not transcribed only compressed). That gives 2e10 hours stored. Storing
it for 2e8 Americans there's space for 100 hours per person. But they also
want the world, not only Americans.

~~~
kennywinker
You seem very confident of your input parameters. What are you basing 0.2-1EB
on? It seems like there is a lot unknown about the utah data center, so all
their "expert estimates" sounded more like guesses. Hence my conclusion
"nobody knows for sure".

Even if, as you say, the estimate is 100hours per person. How much time does
the average person spend on the phone? My current cell plan has 200 _minutes_
per month, and I never go over. Say the average person spends 1000 minutes
(16.7 hours), that means you could store a month of rolling phone
conversations, and be only at 16.7% capacity. That leaves a fair bit of extra
room for persons of interest internationally.

~~~
acqq
Your estimate is correct, somewhere on HN I've read that average young
American talks 20 hours per month, older somewhat less. You're also correct
that as soon as they decide that not everybody is actually important, the
capacity to store communications of "persons of interest" is enough for "the
whole life of the persons of interest."

Regarding my estimates, somebody here on HN also sent a link to the highest
capacity automated tape libraries, and using them instead of hard disks the
estimation of capacity still fits in the same order of magnitude. I still
assume hard disks are more convenient than tapes for anything that needs to be
accessed "when needed" (who would accept to say "will get the data bout the
terrorists regarding the attack tomorrow, but it will take two days." So I can
even bet that the main storage there are hard disks.

------
twoodfin
No, says an unnamed NSA "colleague" of a former analyst. Say what you like
about Snowden, but at least some of his claims have been backed up by
evidence. What have these guys got? Why not name names?

~~~
kennywinker
Because then they'll have to flee the country like that "traitor" Snowden?

Not saying it wouldn't be the right thing to do, but I am saying it would
definitely come at a cost to them and their friends.

~~~
twoodfin
Why? A colleague of Tice's told him a few weeks ago that every domestic
communication is being recorded. Tice is now a private citizen, and he has
every right to tell us that colleague's name.

But he won't, and I suspect that the reason is that his claim is fanciful.

~~~
rhizome
Recent history tells us there's proof out there, and that it typically follows
a denial by Obama or the intelligence communities.

~~~
kennywinker
I get your emotional position, but this is just some bad logic. "If the
government denies it, it must be true" is not a useful tool. How about "recent
history says that this kind of thing could potentially be true, and that the
government wouldn't admit if it was."

~~~
rhizome
Thanks for the condescension, but you misunderstood me: we'll find out after
the denial, _when the doc release occurs_. The denial doesn't substitute for
the doc release.

------
northwest
> He claims the NSA tapped the phone of high-level government officials and
> the news media 10 years ago.

That would explain why Obama seems to have become the best sheep ever:

1\. Spy on them

2\. Collect everything that's somehow "embarrassing" for them

3\. Regularly remind them of what happens if they don't do what would want
them to do

By that logic, they have probably "vetted" Obama thoroughly, before deciding
to _not_ discredit/destroy him completely in front of the public.

~~~
alan_cx
Indeed. This is the obvious issue every seems to be skirting over. Even the
mass media seems not as out rages as it easily could be. Problem is we can
never know to what extent this may or may not happen. What is needed is a high
ranking politician to come out, admit to something awful and go on record to
being black mailed.

See, I cant believe that you get to politician age and have a perfect record.
I cant believe that the security services would be interested in politicians
back grounds. And now we see the mechanism to get all the information they
need to comprehensively check them out. So, I almost cant understand why a
security service would not raise such issues with prospective politicians,
high ranking business men, media, etc. It would be negligent not to. Well,
with out saying opr threatening anything, such people know that the security
services have something damaging on them which could be leaked. They don't
need to be told, do they? Such people are fairly bright. The implications are
obvious. Tow the line, don't dump on the security services. And if asked to
support some evil new power, well........

To my mind the blackmail circle and potential to select politicians, and
others is too obvious.

------
EdSharkey
OF COURSE they'd store the contents of our communication, it would be foolish
for them not to now that they have the means! The algorithms for speech to
text are probably near perfect by now, especially since they have SO MUCH
sample data to work with. I doubt you'd need to store the raw audio data, just
turn the transcript into full text "metadata".

The main issue is that our information is being stored - INDEFINITELY. You've
got to be naive to think this data won't be abused eventually. It will be
sold, or it will be used to control. Reading between the lines in some of
these news stories, I have to believe that all the walls between the civil and
law enforcement agencies are coming down, and it's all one big data mart FTW.

We must bar them from generally capturing and storing information about us. A
crime needs to be under investigation about an individual or group before the
data capture can begin.

------
blisterpeanuts
Backups! That's the upside of this whole NSA domestic spying brouhaha. How
many times have you wanted to replay a phone conversation, or recover an email
from a past account, or throw your boss's memo back in his face when he tries
to "scope creep" your project?

That's right. Probably every one of us wishes for this capability. And then
there's the federal budget deficit, no? I propose to kill two birds with one
stone here. NSA can offer to "remember it for you wholesale" as Philip K. Dick
put it! Maybe $0.10 per byte (or $0.25/minute for audio) to search and provide
on CD virtually anything you have said or done since 1992.

It's actually rather comforting to think that, although they're not very good
at their primary mission of stopping terrorism, they have this great ancillary
benefit that we can all take advantage of!

------
codex
Should this turn out to be true, the legal rationale is likely that a warrant
is only need to read a communication, not to collect it. So "they" archive
everything and then promise to look at it only when legal to do so. The NSA
can even record American citizens if they promise not to read the data if it
turns out to be an American they've recorded (unless the FBI wants the data,
of course).

Even if this promise holds, though, people may dislike this policy, to put it
mildly. If a robot takes a naked picture of me, it's an invasion of privacy
even if no human ever looks at it.

------
northwest
If you are tired of having the same discussions _over and over again_ :

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152935](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152935)

------
j2d3
he's making a list, checking it twice; gonna find out who's naughty and
nice...

~~~
saraid216
Pretty sure that's God.

------
LekkoscPiwa
Crazy idea: software that would generate TBs of fake communications (email,
skype calls, etc) daily to disrupt NSA operations. Possible? Helpful?

~~~
northwest
If you're paying taxes in the US, you would probably hate this concept, b/c:

You spend something like 25% of your work life (taxes) to pay for something
that works against you (mass surveillance). Then you start trowing stones at
it while continuing to work for it.

~~~
LekkoscPiwa
Nah, doesn't make sense. According to this fighting nazism while being German
wouldn't have make sense in 1930s because you pay taxes.

~~~
northwest
What I mean is:

We also need to start getting rid of the _root_ of the problem, not only try
to fight some symptoms (patching holes is OK for the short term).

~~~
LekkoscPiwa
Again, similar to Nazi Germany in 1930s. If you have a democratic society
where 90% voters are against freedom and vote for all the wars are in favor of
all the BS -- there is only this much you can do.

