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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, Interesting) by TheLink on Friday March 21 2014, @11:11AM

    by TheLink (332) on Friday March 21 2014, @11:11AM (#19231) Journal
    Does that mean if I set a system up to automatically download lots of movies, music and software it doesn't mean I am personally committing copyright infringement until I actually use the stuff?

    Or if I'm running a TOR relay/end node, I'm not legally liable for any of the traffic as long as I am not personally accessing it?
    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 21 2014, @12:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 21 2014, @12:01PM (#19247)

    "Or if I'm running a TOR relay/end node, I'm not legally liable for any of the traffic as long as I am not personally accessing it?"

    Don't worry, the partyvan will be along shortly...