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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 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 ;)