When it was disclosed late last year that the NSA was was conducting warrantless wiretapping of Americans – a flagrant violation of the US constitution – President Bush assured the nation it was a very limited program that is focused on communication with known terrorist organization: "If you’re talking to Al-Qaeda, we want to know about it." Evidently tens of millions of Americans must be speaking with Al-Qaeda:
The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.
"It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation’s borders, this person added.
The Web site of N24 has a fitting headline: "Milliardenfach abgehört: Orwells Schatten über Amerika" The calendar says 2006, but it sure feels a lot like 1984.
Each month I write a check to AT&T and Verizon for my telephone service, and in return they send a list of every telephone call I make to the NSA. From now on: Skype.
0 comment
Are you going to file a suit?
Is Skype really that safe?
I guess, this means that Hayden will not get confirmed. And the CIA will get a civilian head instead who will work on human intel, which is much more needed than such geeky NSA nonsense.
Hi NSA, I know you are reading this. We are used to Echelon:
http://atlanticreview.org/archives/256-Federal-Eavesdropping-Scandal.html
However, I heard the Italians are doing even more eavesdropping with less oversight. The French are pretty tough as well.
I would love to sue AT&T and Verizon for giving away private information if I can find a lawyer who would do this pro bono.
Hopefully I can join in a class action lawsuit through the ACLU or some other civil rights organization.
There are no means of communications or encryption devices that have not been approved by security agencies.
If you have something to hide, use the old fashioned book code and take care that the information you provide isn’t “hot” longer than 20 minutes.
Does the NSA read your emails? Try this:
1) Create a web page that contains nothing, that no other web page links to, so no search engine can find it. Install a statcounter.
2) Create a new anonym email account.
3) Send an email from your default email account to the new account. Provide this email with the url of the webpage you have created.
The url in this email will be the only link to your webpage in the world!
Check your stats – if you register a hit, you’re double crossed!
Olaf,
Are you a CIA infiltrator?
RE: Lawsuits. It looks like the telcos are liable for billions of dollars of damages:
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/05/11/telcos-liable/
@ David,
Olaf is a senior official of the Ostfriesischer Geheimdienst. Be careful. Das flenst!
@ Olaf,
How should I create such a webpage? When I create a webpage, I leave behind a trail for Google and other spiders, don’t I?
Google does not just work by links, but by spidering all servers, don’t they?
Jorg, I’m not sure that google spiders servers. I think Google can search for pages that link each other, but pages that stand alone should be very difficult to find. The only pages Google can find, imho, are those which are not password-protected on the server side, the index.php/html for example and every page linked with it.
Anyway, to make sure, one could also configure robot.txt on the server to disallow bots the url in question, but I don’t think this is necessary.
Ostfriesland? Hey, I’m living in Nordfriesland! Almost Denmark! By the way, I’ve been in Electronic Warfare almost 12 years, in the cold war, eaves dropping on the Russians in the GDR.
What the NSA is doing now sounds fantastic, some billions phone calls and emails detected, but: it is not a great thing to gather the signals, to draw organigrams of the participants communicating. On-time-analysis is another thing, the needles’s eye due to the lack of human resources which all informations have to pass.
Given that all these billions of transmissions are recorded you might have a tool to discover something relevant with hindsight, but hardly in advance.
SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, gives you an impression: They have teraflops of information, every beep of a very large section of space has been recorded, but there aren’t enough computers in the world to analyze them – and, if they keep collecting data, they would never have the time to analyze them all. Same with the NSA. On earth, on security matters, every ‘hot’ information detected is regarded ‘dead’ after 20 minutes. Remember that the ‘detector’ is just the first person, the first link in the chain of command, who reports the info. This info will be on the desk of a staff officer after 20 minutes, on the desk of a chief executive after 30 minutes – then, by chance, down again to someone who does the job and fights the threat. Makes 60 minutes. On a battle field, in combat, when all participants speak frankly online, this works well, because you know the structure and positions of the enemy forces. But I’m afraid the NSA will prevent any terrorist attack through analysis of shitloads of organigramms of northamerican telcom traffics.
The real bad guys won’t forget that the internet was originally a military facility and that it is only available to the public now because there are no means of communications that cannot be analyzed by secret services.
Dreckfuhler: But I’m afraid the NSA will *not* prevent any terrorist attack…
google won’t spider a site without a link or an ‘add to index’-request. BUT most hosters will send your uri to google, so that it can start spidering after a while. If you want to make sure, create a page on that new site like kkjemjj2.htm and then look at the statistics. But if you use index.htm, some bot will eventually turn up – specially since some try to look up new registrations.
And not all bots will honor the robots.txt!