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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."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday March 21 2014, @09:21AM
The NSA and CIA are an existential threat to our freedom. It's them or us. We techies and geeks bear a special burden to fight. We designed the systems they broke. We must fix them. We have access to the same math and science they do. What we lack in individual resources we make up for in great numbers and vastly more decentralized set of nodes. We can beat them. We must beat them.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 21 2014, @09:29AM
I know man! What's the matter? They just mad 'cause we get more pussy than they do?
(Score: 1) by bob_super on Friday March 21 2014, @05:05PM
Then what? Make underwear for $1/day?
Sadly, most of the recent US growth, outside of fracking, can be attributed to surveillance (corporate and state) and the military.
Elon Musk can't employ everyone...