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Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations

KyleG

By KyleG
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KyleG Newbie

KyleG

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Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in
US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical
assistant for the CIA
and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.
Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last
four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz
Allen and Dell.

The Guardian, after several days of interviews,
is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to
disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined
not to opt for the protection of anonymity. "I have no intention of
hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong," he said.

Magnus Newbie

Magnus

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Snowden dropped a few hints about having had access to anything he wanted -- every intel officer's personal record, even a President's personal email ... 

I hope he really has these records, with triple-redundant backups and friends around the world who'll release it if/when Snowden gets in trouble. Right now, his only chance of survival is to stay out in the open. 

The only thing that surprises me about PRISM is that it took so long for the mainstream press to run a story about it. 

The bit about the NSA only taking metadata is laughable. Metadata is also known as "search criteria." They can use the metadata to index and find the actual phone call audio, when they have a reason to retrieve it. 

Literally everything is being captured. That data center in Utah isn't for recording TV shows. 

J-William Newbie

J-William

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The bit about the NSA only taking metadata is laughable. Metadata is also known as "search criteria." They can use the metadata to index and find the actual phone call audio, when they have a reason to retrieve it. 

Literally everything is being captured. That data center in Utah isn't for recording TV shows. 

 


Absolutely!

 

When you look at the capacity they have and the capacity they are building; it is more than enough to record every single phone, Skype, im, Facebook, or twitter conversation.

I was looking into it a few weeks ago when I saw a comment about the feasibility of recording every phone conversation.

The short answer is that it is possible,

The long answer: If they were to record at a normal bit-rate for voice say 32 or 64kbits/sec then it would take an absolutely insane amount of storage and would not be possible. But there are very low bit-rate codecs along the order of 600 to 800bit/sec. At that bit rate it would be a fairly trivial matter to store all of the voice communications for the US for a long time.

Do we know that's what the Utah data-center is for? Nope, we don't know anything, but with the size of that Utah data-center they could probably record everything and keep it around for long-term storage, since tapes can currently store at least 250TB per square foot we're looking at maximum roughly 375 exabytes at the Utah data center... Whic doesn't square with the claimed Yottabyte, but whatever...

An hour long conversation recorded at 600bits/sec is 270kB... so doing some very rough math, you have 1,500,000,000,000,000 hours of conversations recorded at the NSA's new faciltiy.

Divide 1,500,000,000,000,000 by 300,000,000 and you get 500 million hours of recording time for every man woman and child in the United states. So that's clearly ridiculous because most people don't live more than about 700,000 hours :D

Magnus Newbie

Magnus

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I don't know much about compression and codecs, but I read somewhere recently that it can be optimized for speech, making the storage of telephony very efficient.

Considering that the size of the Utah Data Center greatly exceeds the requirements for recording all phone calls, the data the government keeps must also include everyone's Internet activity, too. 

Guest darkskyabove

Guest darkskyabove

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The entire "official" response can be analyzed based on one simple concept. There already exists, and has for years, ways to encrypt communications that even the vaunted NSA cannot reasonably expect to crack. Anyone dumb enough to post their "terrorist" activities on something like Facebook deserves to be caught (or are participants in a false-flag operation). In the midst of this perennial governmental sideshow, what they're not telling you is that regardless of the billions spent and the violations of the Constitution, the truly evil geniuses are beyond their reach. They are having trouble catching "shoe" and "underwear" bombers. Are these the people I would trust with my security? Not a chance.

I say, let the Federal morons build hundreds of data collection centers. It won't help their cause, and it will accelerate the process of bankrupting their idiocy. Spying on people to discover whether they watch one stupid TV program versus another has the sum total of ZERO use.

Granted, their entire mindset is totalitarian, and should be resisted in every way possible. But, they're desperate, and haven't a clue how to respond to the changing times.

In a twisted way of thinking, we should all vote for MORE welfare, to help speed up the process of unsustainability. When it falls apart, we can patch it back together, without the elitist power-mongers.

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