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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: 3, Funny) by mechanicjay on Friday March 21 2014, @11:41AM
My brain, before coffee and before the reality of the modern security state set in, read the headline as, "NASA Time Machine ". I got really excited and clicked into the story. Oh, it's just business as usual. Now, where's my cloud hosted email....
I propose reassigning the NSA's budget line to NASA. Maybe then we will get a Time Machine or something else cool. In the worst case, even if NASA pissed it all away on hookers and blow, it'd still be a better use of the money.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.