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NSA Time-Machine for Phone Calls Abroad

posted by LaminatorX on Friday March 21 2014, @08:17AM   Printer-friendly
from the if-a-phone-is-tapped-and-no-one-hears-it-does-it-make-a-sound dept.

Fluffeh writes:

"National Security Agency documents released this week by The Washington Post gave a glimpse of an NSA program that allows the agency to capture the voice content of virtually every phone call in an unnamed country and perform searches against the stored calls' metadata to find and listen to conversations for up to a month after they happened. Bulk methods capture massive data flows 'without the use of discriminants,' as President Obama put it in January. By design, they vacuum up all the data they touch; meaning that most of the conversations collected by RETRO would be irrelevant to U.S. national security interests.

Of course, whether that capture can be considered monitoring comes down to semantics. In the NSA's reasoning, it's not 'surveillance' until a human listens in. And since most of the calls accessible by Retrospective are flushed from its 'cache' after a month without being queried, the NSA could argue that the calls have never been surveilled."

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 21 2014, @08:49AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 21 2014, @08:49AM (#19193)

    Brill: "The government's been in bed with the entire telecommunications industry since the forties. They've infected everything. They get into your bank statements, computer files, email, listen to your phone calls... Every wire, every airwave. The more technology used, the easier it is for them to keep tabs on you. It's a brave new world out there. At least it'd better be." - EOTS

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by morgauxo on Friday March 21 2014, @01:05PM

    by morgauxo (2082) on Friday March 21 2014, @01:05PM (#19268)

    The 40s sounds about right. 1840s that is. How do you think they got the right-a-way to run all those telegraph poles without lots of cooporation with the government? No doubt the relationship has carried through time all the way to today.