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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, Interesting) by c0lo on Friday March 21 2014, @11:54AM
No mate, you are wrong. That's an (supposed) intelligence agency which collects all the idioticy of everyday phone conversations from all the the countries they can get, store them for a month and discard them, 'cause they can't filter this sheer amount in any significant way.
And you, the tax paying citizens, just coughed $1.5billions [datacenterknowledge.com] for a new centre and will continue to pay the operational expenses of this institution which seems to be extremely efficient in grinding those money into a useless dust.
You call this waste... intelligence?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford