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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: 1) by chown on Friday March 21 2014, @06:12PM
And since most of the calls accessible by Retrospective are flushed from its 'cache' after a month without being queried
Why would anyone believe this?
Exactly, why would anybody believe this? If you believe any more that NSA does what it claims, then you're downright naive. But even if you do so, why would you believe they would flush things competently? That among the thousands of human hands that have access to this data, not a single one would consider using it in a way you wouldn't prefer?