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Thread: Is privacy coming back?

  1. #91
    Quote Originally Posted by Scott Shepherd View Post
    You might just want to check that data- EVERY call made is being RECORDED. The Utah data center is said to have enough capacity to store everything ever created to date.

    EVERY call IS being recorded. That's not even a point of debate at this point in time. It's been admitted in front on congress. The carriers have no say so in it. Screaming libertarians or not.

    If you don't think this is happening, you need to look into a little more.

    Here's the data center that's being built :

    http://www.wired.com/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/

    Here's how large it is, in terms of storage :

    "the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)"
    The problem is, your Wired articles site no sources that actually confirm any of what they claim. They can say whatever they want, secure in the knowledge that no NSA official will either confirm or deny.

    And his own facts don't jive with his claims. For example, he says "The NSA has long been free to eavesdrop on international satellite communications. But after 9/11, it installed taps in US telecom “switches,” gaining access to domestic traffic. An ex-NSA official says there are 10 to 20 such installations."

    Well, there are literally thousands of switches in the U.S. The baby bells have hundreds, the 2nd and 3rd tier carriers many, many more. You are going to need access to each one of them before you can claim you're recording all calls. I'd be satisfied with half and a statistics slight of hand. But 10 to 20?

    So I'm afraid I'd just have to clump these sorts of claims into the conspiracy theory category. And I'm not ready to start wearing my tinfoil hate so they can't read my mind.

    Not yet.

  2. #92
    Quote Originally Posted by Phil Thien View Post
    The problem is, your Wired articles site no sources that actually confirm any of what they claim. They can say whatever they want, secure in the knowledge that no NSA official will either confirm or deny.

    And his own facts don't jive with his claims. For example, he says "The NSA has long been free to eavesdrop on international satellite communications. But after 9/11, it installed taps in US telecom “switches,” gaining access to domestic traffic. An ex-NSA official says there are 10 to 20 such installations."

    Well, there are literally thousands of switches in the U.S. The baby bells have hundreds, the 2nd and 3rd tier carriers many, many more. You are going to need access to each one of them before you can claim you're recording all calls. I'd be satisfied with half and a statistics slight of hand. But 10 to 20?

    So I'm afraid I'd just have to clump these sorts of claims into the conspiracy theory category. And I'm not ready to start wearing my tinfoil hate so they can't read my mind.

    Not yet.
    So you just ignore them admitting to it in front of congress because you don't believe what Snowden says? It's not up for debate, it's been confirmed.

    What you you expect, for a spy organization to come out and openly say "Here's all the way's we are spying on you?". That's a bit farfetched, considering they deny any black operation even exists, even when they do exist.
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  3. #93
    Again, you might want to do your research....here's an article about the guy that blew the whistle on it. It's called "Stellar Wind". He should know because he's the guy that actually wrote the software to do it.

    http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews...-s-phone-calls

    http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/c...r-wind-exposed
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  4. #94
    Quote Originally Posted by Scott Shepherd View Post
    So you just ignore them admitting to it in front of congress because you don't believe what Snowden says? It's not up for debate, it's been confirmed.

    What you you expect, for a spy organization to come out and openly say "Here's all the way's we are spying on you?". That's a bit farfetched, considering they deny any black operation even exists, even when they do exist.
    You keep saying it isn't up for debate, it has been confirmed. Got a link showing that? I can't find anything of the sort. I read two newspapers a day, never saw anything where someone said "oh yeah, we record all convos."

    And no, I don't expect the NSA to tell me everything they're up to. But that doesn't mean I'm going to believe everything YOU tell me they're up to, either.

  5. #95
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    Quote Originally Posted by Scott Shepherd View Post
    So do you think that there's a server farm somewhere with 1000's of computers in it, all running as part of the TOR network to be used exactly as that compromised node?
    Seems like they take more direct action--make your node compromised. See the article referenced at #24 here: http://gizmodo.com/65-things-we-know...now-1586633452

  6. #96
    Quote Originally Posted by Phil Thien View Post
    You keep saying it isn't up for debate, it has been confirmed. Got a link showing that? I can't find anything of the sort. I read two newspapers a day, never saw anything where someone said "oh yeah, we record all convos."

    And no, I don't expect the NSA to tell me everything they're up to. But that doesn't mean I'm going to believe everything YOU tell me they're up to, either.
    See post above yours.
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  7. #97
    Quote Originally Posted by Scott Shepherd View Post
    Again, you might want to do your research....here's an article about the guy that blew the whistle on it. It's called "Stellar Wind". He should know because he's the guy that actually wrote the software to do it.

    http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews...-s-phone-calls

    http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/c...r-wind-exposed
    He hasn't worked for the NSA since 2001, and he didn't say they were archiving the voice data, just "recording the calls."

    Here, read this:

    In March 2012 Wired magazine published "The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)" talking about a vast new NSA facility in Utah and said, "For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellarwind, in detail," naming the official William Binney, a former NSA code breaker. Binney went on to say that the NSA had highly secured rooms that tap into major switches, and satellite communications at both AT&T and Verizon.[8] The article suggested that the supposedly-dispatched Stellarwind continues as an active program. This conclusion was supported by the exposure of Room 641A in AT&T's operations center in San Francisco in 2006.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William...gence_official)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A


    Hardly exhaustive.

    If you have anything indicating the program is far more exhaustive, I'm all eyes.

  8. #98
    Quote Originally Posted by Phil Thien View Post
    He hasn't worked for the NSA since 2001, and he didn't say they were archiving the voice data, just "recording the calls."

    Here, read this:

    In March 2012 Wired magazine published "The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)" talking about a vast new NSA facility in Utah and said, "For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellarwind, in detail," naming the official William Binney, a former NSA code breaker. Binney went on to say that the NSA had highly secured rooms that tap into major switches, and satellite communications at both AT&T and Verizon.[8] The article suggested that the supposedly-dispatched Stellarwind continues as an active program. This conclusion was supported by the exposure of Room 641A in AT&T's operations center in San Francisco in 2006.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William...gence_official)
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A


    Hardly exhaustive.

    If you have anything indicating the program is far more exhaustive, I'm all eyes.
    Sure, explain to me how you record something digitally without it being archived. Impossible. If it's written to a drive, it's been stored. That means, exactly what I said, that the calls are being recorded. When we started this conversation, you said it wasn't happening at all. Now you're saying they are being recorded, but not archived. You can't have it both ways. Those articles show the program exists, the very program you denied existing earlier in this thread. I don't have anything to prove. I don't work for the NSA, but when the people that wrote the software are verifying the documents released by Snowden, then I tend to believe it's true.

    If you don't want to believe it, that's up to you, but I've read enough and seen enough examples to know what I believe, and when Congressmen and Women are on record, saying that it's happening, then I tend to believe them as well. They have access to more than I do.
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  9. #99
    Scott, I see what you're saying, but he didn't say what that link said he said. LOL, he said:

    “At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US”, Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.”

    But the article you linked sort of misstates (sensationalizes) what he said. They open with this:

    NSA whistleblower William Binney (shown) has made the startling claim that the NSA is recording the audio of at least 80 percent of Americans' telephone calls. The NSA acknowledged in 2013, after repeated and explicit denials, that it was recording telephone metadata, but it still denies it is keeping the audio of any American's phone calls.

    So in reality, if I call you from Milwaukee to VA, NSA doesn't get a chance at OUR call. But if I'm in Iraq and call you, then yeah, they _have a chance_ at our call.

    But again, he hasn't worked for the NSA since 2001. And he is a disgruntled former employee, they (NSA) didn't go with his program. So whatever he says is a bit questionable.

    Not trying to be difficult, just trying to keep it real.

    Oh, and I never said call recording wasn't happening at all. Just that it wasn't happening on a large scale.

    I know this, because secrets like that are hard to keep. Once you need to enlist people outside the intelligence community, they leak. They leak like sieves. And BTW, many of the switches involves are Nortel and Siemens. Those are foreign outfits.

  10. #100
    Quote Originally Posted by Phil Thien View Post
    So in reality, if I call you from Milwaukee to VA, NSA doesn't get a chance at OUR call. But if I'm in Iraq and call you, then yeah, they _have a chance_ at our call.
    That's simply not true, according to many other sources. So they denied the metadata gathering for a decade. Now when people "in the know" say they are recording all calls, and they say "No we aren't", I'm supposed to shrug my shoulders and say "nothing to see here?".

    They've proven time and time again that they are doing exactly what these people are saying they are doing. In fact, I can't think of one instance where they weren't doing what they were being accused of.
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  11. #101
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    Quote Originally Posted by John Coloccia View Post
    ....and I hope ello succeeds.
    This was the first I heard about ello when I read this thread yesterday. This morning on the audio in the gym (Sirius/XM), the DJ was waxing about it as well. I guess they are getting 35k hits/day for folks trying to get in. He also said folks are selling their invites on eBay for $500!!!
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  12. #102
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    Quote Originally Posted by John Coloccia View Post
    You would be wrong. Try to remember, Pat, that the person wearing the crown won't always have the same ideas that you do.
    So I suspected. Its not the concept that you dislike but the actual person in charge. No matter, that changes every 4 years. No matter who is president, I will always support them, even though I may or may not have voted for them. The legislative branch is where all that gets confused. They ONLY care about their own necks, not what is good for the country.

  13. #103
    Quote Originally Posted by Pat Barry View Post
    So I suspected. Its not the concept that you dislike but the actual person in charge. No matter, that changes every 4 years. No matter who is president, I will always support them, even though I may or may not have voted for them. The legislative branch is where all that gets confused. They ONLY care about their own necks, not what is good for the country.
    As plainly as I can say it, it's the concept I dislike.

  14. #104
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    Let's keep the political discussion at zero, Folks.
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  15. #105
    Quote Originally Posted by Scott Shepherd View Post
    That's simply not true, according to many other sources. So they denied the metadata gathering for a decade. Now when people "in the know" say they are recording all calls, and they say "No we aren't", I'm supposed to shrug my shoulders and say "nothing to see here?".

    They've proven time and time again that they are doing exactly what these people are saying they are doing. In fact, I can't think of one instance where they weren't doing what they were being accused of.
    Here is the thing, for these conspiracy theorists to be right, for all these conversations to have been recorded, you'd need the cooperation of at least hundreds of civilians, many not even U.S. citizens.

    They'd all need to keep their mouths shut about making changes to accommodate the spooks. Think of the engineers that worked at places like Northern Telecom, Siemens, AT&T, the hundreds (thousands?) of field network engineers, they'd all have to keep their mouths shut.

    And if this has been going on for 15 years, they'd all have to keep quiet for the entire duration.

    And then you see stories like this:
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...e-nsa-scandal/

    Where the NSA is asking for metadata from Verizon. Why bother? If they already have 80% of the voice, they have the metadata, too.

    Lots of exaggerated claims, people love conspiracy theories, but most don't hold up to even mild scrutiny.

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