*ANYONE* Who Says the NSA Isn't recording PHONE CONVERSATIONS

Anyone who says or believes this *either* HAS THEIR HEAD IN THE SAND or they are party to the Domestic Spying.

I've had people tell me they are just capturing call logs. It's total B.S.

Here's why:
In order to legally prove that phone calls have something to do with a crime, you have to have some *probable cause* in order to get a court to allow you to even grant access to the PHONE RECORDS, let alone put a WIRE TAP ON THEIR PHONE.

The reason why law enforcement needs *probable cause* is so they do NOT VIOLATE the 4th AMENDMENT to go on a fishing expedition for information (which *is* unreasonable search).

If law enforcement EVER got information that would support a case for prosecution of a crime against a person from phone records or a wire-tap WITHOUT a court order, the evidence and any evidence that resulted from that information WOULD BE POISONED FRUIT, and not allowed in a COURT OF LAW.

The reason why the Bush Admin didn't go through FISA is because they WANTED TO GO ON A FISHING EXPEDITION for information. And there is the key to why the NSA has captured actual CONVERSATIONS, not just call logs: Because you can not DRAW CONCLUSIONS about crimes from phone logs without having PROBABLE CAUSE. Coincidence, concealed numbers, use of public phones and disposable pre-paid phones WILL PREVENT ANY TYPE OF CONCLUSIONS, logical or otherwise, about the communications of individuals, especially when TENS OF MILLIONS of INDIVIDUALS are being tracked. There is not even enough to build a CIRCUMSTANTIAL CASE.

So why would they need to collect this information? BECAUSE THEY ARE RECORDING ALL OF THE CONVERSATIONS.

And if you don't think it's technically possible to collect all that data, think again. IT IS. My proof: Google. Google captures a practical equivalent of the data that would be required. And Google is using technicology that is publically available. Imagine what technologies we are not aware of that the gov't has access to.

Now, a more interesting question is: what are they doing with all that data? It certainly ISN'T to capture terrorist. What terrorists have been caught using this database? Even if they did, the evidence wouldn't be admissable in a court of law (not like that would matter, they would just ship them off to Gitmo). If there was EVEN ONE, I gaurantee they'd be parading that case through the streets of D.C.

http://www.narus.com/products/intercept.html

10 billion bits/second. Of course they were listening in. And analyzing--on the fly.

Quote:


Source: http://www.narus.com/products/index.html

So just imagine, it's technically possible they have all your emails and know about all the websites you visit, all the software you've downloaded. Do you trust them not to have done it? I wouldn't.

"Unparalleled flexibility and extensibility, easily configured to meet any customer requirement and to feed any IP service such as security, lawful intercept or even Skype blocking."

"Blocking". They can't read one byte of Skype encoded data. Maybe it's time for everyone to get "Skyped".

http://www.skype.com/

They would be the ultimate insider traders, with all the inside dope on EVERY COMPANY!

They could feed their own companies, and their friends, with all the inside dope on their competitors.
Industrial espionage made to order.

on any issue, whatsoever?

"We will lie to you." Donald Rumsfeld.

I think we all know that silly! THEY ARE SPYING ON ALL KNOWN, UNKNOWN AND POTENTIAL POLITICAL ENEMIES! That is who! And how naive are our dear democratic leaders???

:grr:

or nice..... :eyes:

And I don't think they have plans to be Santa Claus....

that is what we believe here in my home leftchick.

They're not planning on ever using that information in a court of law; I think it more likely that they use these connections to detain people indefinitely in the name of 'National Security.' (Edit: Or to *ahem* influence them politically)

Nevermind poisoned fruit, this administration regime is trying to get rid of the other branches of government.

Spying on Kerry's campaign, gathering info to blackmail congresscritters, etc., etc...

Not feasible, anyway. Google searches amount to a handful of data packets apiece. Conversations are a much bigger proposition; trust me on this, as I hear every day about the quality of my customers' VoIP calls.

Not only is it not feasible to record all conversations, it's not even desirable. No one has the manpower to listen to all that data. The government is simply trying to grab the power to record any conversation. There's a big difference there. It's a big fishing expedition, all right--one designed to help the gummint decide where to tap, and when.

Voicemail systems already are designed to keep recorded conversations.

The problem is storage. SAN Technology has improved dramatically, even over the last few years.

The amount of storage the U.S. Government can purchase is practically limitless.

Voice recognition software already exists in the public domain that can parse a voice-recorded conversation. Parsed words out of the conversations could be kept for key-word searching of the audio files. Lord only knows how good the DoD's VR software is.

The government employs MILLIONS of people.

100,000 individuals could monitor 10 million people at a ratio of 1:100. With VR software, I'm sure that ratio is upwards of 10,000.

The actual money the DoD/NSA and other classified organizations spends is classified data. But for certain, it is well over 1/2 A TRILLION DOLLARS. I would not be surprised if the DoD spends well over a TRILLION on classified programs. This NSA program would likely get more money than Microsoft has made in the last TEN YEARS.

IT IS FEASIBLE.

...since there aren't a hundred thousand people to listen to phones. If there were, we'd know.

It's doable but would cost a bundle.

Drop in the bucket to Bush.

BTW, Where do you get that number?

provide those databases for these "Homeland Security" procurements at generous discounts for large purchases and the opportunity for the business.

Whether it cost $200Million per year or more, that number is irrelevant...this spending limit free administration never met something that they didn't just sign the check for if they wanted it. And they are getting it....

gigantic war budget, or make it a "black project" with no oversight and take as much money as they want for it.

One of these--analyzing 10 billion bits/secord--is installed in Seattle, San Jose, San Diego, and Los Angeles ATT switch rooms, and probably every other major hub, "providing analysts with real-time, surgical targeting of suspect information".

http://www.narus.com/products/intercept.html

Every call is listened to, just not by humans.

...of recording/analyzing every call.

It's more than capable, though, of "targeting suspect information." Not every call; just every call they're interested in.

The call record database is one way they'll choose targets. C'mon, folks, if they were able to analyze every packet, they wouldn't have needed everyone's phone records.

And with that, target information can be developed to begin systematic gathering of all information on the target population.

So called 'poisoned fruit' used in a legal detention means nothing, because the detention(s) will be extra-constitutional and as such the need for legality is immaterial.

The targets are the political opponents and 'potential' political opponents of those in power. The objective of power is more power. To stop power, it must be challenged at every step so that it cannot ever achieve enough power to overcome the shackles placed on it by the agreement, or if you will, the contract called the Constitution. When the contract between the governed and those that govern is first breached, that is the time to challenge power, because power never stops with just 'little' breaches. Power always goes to the edge and a little over in it's encroachments on the contract until the contract has been totally subverted.

We should have never 'let them off the hook' for killing Kennedy, Bobbie and MLK. We should have never allowed Nixon to be pardoned. We should have never allowed Reagan to bust unions and pack the NLRB. We should never allowed Ollie/Bu$h the Elder to conduct a war in Central America and ship dope into south LA. The list goes on and on right-up until today.

At each of those events, we the people did not hold power accountable. And now it will take extreme measures to remove them from their positions of power.

Edit: BTW, did you know the word "Constitution" is one word those machines use to flag 'potential' terrorists. That's right, those that discuss the Constitution are potential political opponents, terrorists. Potential political opponents = terrorists, in their minds.

Does it now make sense why Republicans and even the Democrats in Congress march lock-step with the executive? Think blackmail.

:puke:

...process ALL of the phone calls using key word scanning technology, and then record the calls that trigger interest?

Now, by using the phrase "trigger interest", I am convinced that the NSA system is being used for MUCH more than combatting terrorism, and I'd like to know what those other reasons are, and I'd like to know why they're doing this outside of the FISA system.

If what they're doing is illegal, and I believe that it is, WHAT are they doing?

You always need to keep the raw data.

And wouldn't it be awesome to be able to play back the voice conversation of your political propponents and opponents to them in the oval office! Maybe that's what happened to Voinovich when he opposed Bolton's nomination, said it wouldn't get out of committe, and then, crying during his announcemnt that he'd flipped and will allow it through to a floor vote. How else do you keep your party in line?

...because I was recruiting software engineers for a major corporation that was doing work for the NSA.

20 years ago. I suspect keyword scanning has gotten MUCH better than it was 20 years ago.

they will use it to trump up phony charges against innocent Americans (of the liberal persuasion). Watch out for friends and family suddenly in legal trouble.

Your "proof" is not proof. Google does *not* capture an equivalent amount of data, practical or otherwise.

Cached versions of this stuff ARE kept on their servers.

See my post #9 above for clarification.

The level of data processing required to capture and store (two separate functions) voice transmissions for every (or even many) phone conversations is orders of magnitude larger than what Google does.

I saw #9. That doesn't address what I'm saying here, which is merely that your comparison of Google to what the NSA might be doing does not provide proof of anything.

The scale is on a different level. Google is not "proof", but I look at it as a "proof of concept". Given the resources our Gov't has, they could implement a solution of the appropriate magnitude.

"Proof of concept" is something different.

As mentioned originally, I do not doubt that it is happening, which is to say I agree with what you're saying. I was just quibbling with the "proof."

:toast:

when politely asked (and bribed with money and that anti-net neutrality legislation).

Never mis-underestimate a stinking rat. Remember when Bush said "internets" in the debate with Kerry. The plural was on his mind because that is how he would think of it when all the cheese that would get divided among the rest of the corpoRATs came to be. The ideas of plural and common good are just phrase words for smug asses like bush. The anti-net neutrality act the crooks want sounds like some pretty damn good bait. Obviously with the way things have been run at the NSA that it's very reasonable to assume that bush thinks of the internet as a way to in-snarl people in his own fraud of a life.

this was from a few years back.

without probable cause indefinitely and without access to lawyers and that the terrorist has not right to a hearing, one wonders why they think they need any type of evidence at all.

... if that were true then they would know about us postin
++++**NO CARRIER**++++

...over 5 years now, with acres and acres of server farms that would probably dwarf Google's. All this data just being sucked up and dumped into databases and being archived. They can look up anything they need to when they need to about anyone they want.

The beauty of this is that maybe someday teams of researchers will comb through the data and find out things this criminal administration has done that no one yet knows about. Because you know that the spies are spying on the spies...

Surely the diehards will wake up!

which is so ironic it's killing me.

another point:
everyone keeps referring to 9/11, but the order to do this started before 9/11 if I am not mistaken.

Ties in the latest revelations with the ECHELON program.
http://internationalpress.blogspot.com/

When James Bamford wrote his book on NSA back in 1982, NSA was already taking in the information equivalent of the Library of Congress every few days. It's a guess, but it's a pretty damned good guess that much of that information was in the form of intercepted phone calls, almost certainly domestic phone calls as well as the rest of the world's.

However, it doesn't do much good to have all those conversations recorded without knowing who is calling whom. That's why the phone companies' records were needed, to provide an index of numbers and names, and probably a lot of other crap like taking voice prints, et cetera.

But it doesn't stop there. Every modern cell phone has inside of it a GPS locator chip which cannot be disabled while the phone is on. They don't just know who you talked to, they know where you've been.

That's just great if you want to passively follow a terrorist, or even less likely, actually help in an emergency, which is why those chips are ostensibly there. But if someone inside of a morally bankrupt White House wanted to say, track a political candidate to see what neighborhood his mistress lived in, or create a list of donors to be intimidated, or listen in on strategy conversations, well, they could do that, too.

Has the White House used this information for political purposes? I think they have. The big difference between what the NSA was doing then and what the NSA is doing now is glaringly obvious: they're talking about it. That seems to indicate that people inside NSA are disturbed by something more than the mere expansion of NSA's information collection. It seems to suggest that people inside of NSA are disturbed by how that information is being used.

will hobble any effort later on when feds attempt to use the information to get convictions on terrorism charges. That is, assuming that the feds really ARE looking for terrorists. (Sounds more like O.J. out there looking for the "real killer.")

I think if the general public understood better the problems associated with using illegally gained information, then they would be more upset about what the government is doing, about the amounts of time and money they are spending in carrying this program out, and would be MUCH more suspicious of the government's motives.

Here's an excellent illustration of the problem:

Wiretapping May Void Va. Terror Case
by UPI Wire
Apr 26, 2006

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - April 26, 2006 (UPI) -- The Bush administration's use of warrantless wiretaps may have backfired, with the reversal by an appellate court of a Virginia terror conviction.

The case involves prominent Muslim cleric Ali al-Timimi, a U.S. citizen who was convicted last year of inciting his Northern Virginia followers to train for violent jihad against the United States. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Tuesday, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond sent the case back to the convicting judge, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, in Alexandria, the Washington Post reported.

Al-Timimi's attorneys argued the controversial National Security Agency program President George Bush authorized may have resulted in "undisclosed intercepts" that would be a violation of his rights and could void the conviction.

<snip>

http://www.postchronicle.com/news/breakingnews/article_21216108.shtml

VOI meant that discussions were sent as digitized bits that ARE actually stored and recorded, if you will. I have almost no technical background or understanding of such things, so forgive me if what I just wrote was monumentally stupid.