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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 Dogeball on Friday March 21 2014, @09:41AM
The argument that it is not surveillance until viewed only stands if
a) The data is stored securely and encrypted such that it can be neither stolen, leaked nor casually peeked at
b) The agency requires some kind of warrant to access a given individual's records and recordings.
The burden of proof that there is no abuse of power rests on the agency.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by wantkitteh on Friday March 21 2014, @10:00AM
One would hope an organisation like the NSA would be able to keep it's data secret, but Edward Snowden would beg to differ. Following the "caching" of a conversation, and if anyone asks about a specific conversation later on, we have only the NSA's word that they have or haven't listened to it. In response to any inquiries, the NSA would be utterly incapable of giving a trustworthy answer.
Oh, hey, that last sentence stands on it's own quite nicely there (and I only had to make 1 grammatical edit...)
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 21 2014, @01:40PM
Why? Unethical stolen data should be kept secret? Or release it to the world and expose their unethical behavior with example after example of what data they're truly collecting (as opposed to what they say they're collecting)? Unethical organizations should ...REDACTED DUE TO FEAR OF EXPRESSING MY FREE SPEECH
(Score: 1) by chown on Friday March 21 2014, @06:06PM
Oh, hey, that last sentence stands on it's own quite nicely there (and I only had to make 1 grammatical edit...) (emphasis mine)
You should've made more than one grammatical edit....
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Saturday March 22 2014, @04:13PM
Owned. Then again, with your username, I wouldn't expect anything less ;)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Bokononist on Friday March 21 2014, @10:19AM
I disagree, if I send a drone to your house to take pictures of you all day and then try to argue that I'm not really surveilling you because I haven't looked at any of them yet, and I might not look at them if you don't annoy me, would you buy that argument or would you tell me to fuck right off?
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 21 2014, @10:22AM
You had me at the word disagree.
(Score: 2) by Dogeball on Friday March 21 2014, @11:19AM
In your scenario, I am under surveillance because you have unlimited access to any photos taken by your drone.
If you can convince me of a) and b), qualifying b) as you are (technologically) powerless to view the pictures without a warrant then I am not under surveillance until you obtain a warrant to look at those pictures. On obtaining a warrant, you have immediately completed your surveillance, rather than just starting, which is obviously an attractive feature for intelligence agencies (find out if your suspect has been bad, not just if he is being bad) and theoretically reduces their perceived need to resort to illegal tactics.
If a random individual or corporation can obtain such a warrant for surveillance of an individual in their own house, then the authority issuing the warrant is corrupt, which presents an entirely different problem to the surveillance itself (analogous to FISA problems, not NSA problems).
Let's not confuse objections to surveillance (which you obviously have plenty of) to objections to particular surveillance tactics. If there shouldn't be any surveillance, how it is carried out is moot; if there should be, it should be efficient and with proper oversight.
WRT the topic, I'm not at all convinced of a) and b). Convince me, NSA.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Bokononist on Friday March 21 2014, @11:46AM
They could not convince me of a) or b), nor would they bother to try. The warrant should come before the surveillance not after. I'm guessing the month period before flushing the cache is because they don't have enough storage to keep more. Wait until it's a year, 10 years, your whole fucking life. Proper oversight, please, no oversight could be could enough for me for that kind of power, and it shouldn't be for you if you hold your freedom in any esteem(I'm sure you do, not trying to flame just make a point).
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.