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All phone calls in the US are recorded and accessible to the government, claims former FBI agent
UK Daily Mail ^ | May 5, 2013 | DAILY MAIL reporter

Posted on 05/06/2013 10:46:41 AM PDT by kiryandil

A former FBI counterterrorism agent has hinted at a vast and intrusive surveillance network used by the U.S. government to monitor its own citizens.

Tim Clemente admitted as much when he appeared on CNN Wednesday night.

Discussing the Boston Marathon attack and past telephone conversations of Katherine Russell and her now deceased husband, suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Clemente said that those conversations would be available to investigators.

Clemente discussed the issue in this exchange with host Erin Burnett, as recorded by the CNN transcript...

(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...


TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Government; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: bluffdale; civilliberties; clemente; nsa; phone; phonecalls; phonetap; policestate; stellarwind; surveillance; totalinfoawareness; utahdatacenter; williambinney; wiretap
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To: kiryandil

Where are these super servers storing all this information?
Really is there enough memory in the universe to store all the data?


21 posted on 05/06/2013 11:03:30 AM PDT by svcw (If you are dead when your heart stops, why aren't you alive when it starts.)
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To: dswyndon
this is a hella’uva’ amt of phone calls- it boggles the mind

According to this, 3 billion per day or almost 35 thousand per second

22 posted on 05/06/2013 11:05:23 AM PDT by mnehring
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To: GraceG

If you have a smartphone, you can try this app

https://silentcircle.com/


23 posted on 05/06/2013 11:08:46 AM PDT by Coronal
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To: kiryandil

If anyone is assigned to listening to my phone calls, I feel sorry for the SOB. He must be the most bored man on the planet.


24 posted on 05/06/2013 11:09:21 AM PDT by basil (basil --Second Amendment Sisters.org)
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To: mnehring

Imagine a room the size of a gymnasium filled with cabinets the size of refrigerators. In each cabinet are two hundred terabyte drives. How many calls and emails could be recorded and saved? What if there was more than one room like this? Supercomputers could be used to scan the phone calls and emails for certain key words. The vast majority of calls would be ignored by the software but calls that raised enough red flags could then be sent to an analyst who could listen to the call and determine the context of the pre-selected words to determine if an actual threat existed. I think it’s possible.


25 posted on 05/06/2013 11:12:02 AM PDT by GuySwell
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To: svcw

One was just built in Utah. I doubt we have the capability that the FBI agent claims.


26 posted on 05/06/2013 11:13:36 AM PDT by Theoria
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To: mnehring

“What would the memory requirements for this be?”

Whatever they are, this should handle it:

http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/


27 posted on 05/06/2013 11:14:15 AM PDT by Rennes Templar (If guns kill people, how come no one dies at gun shows?)
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To: Buckeye McFrog

Wouldn’t that help out the bad guys?


28 posted on 05/06/2013 11:17:47 AM PDT by stuartcr ("I have habits that are older than the people telling me they're bad for me.")
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To: Rennes Templar

Probably not unless it is done as a speech to text conversion. 3 Billion calls per day is a LOT of data. A years worth could be millions of Terabytes or more.


29 posted on 05/06/2013 11:17:50 AM PDT by mnehring
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To: mnehring

as someone that has created voip systems, i can tell you the audio can be stored @ about 20 kbps (and that would include encryption). the audio quality would be perfectly fine for conversational understanding (careful not to say ‘perfect’)

so the question of storage comes down to... how many minutes do Americans talk on the phone every year? this will lead you to the answer for whether or not it’s easily stored. at first blush, i’d say it’d be no problem if they designed it properly.

indexing it so you can properly pull up all the data related to a person of interest is then key. applying voice recognition to allow for the audio to be ‘parsed’ is also doable. this allows for a call to be flagged in real time and routed to the proper person

the show ‘person of interest’ only gets far fetched when ‘the machine’ starts thinking on its own. otherwise, all the data collection and references into the past is completely possible if not available today

i’m waiting for the day it’s allowed in courts... at which point a judge would bring up your calls over the passed 10 years and point out some behavior from a call years ago to hold against you.


30 posted on 05/06/2013 11:18:16 AM PDT by sten (fighting tyranny never goes out of style)
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To: kiryandil

Well... duh. Everyone had to already assume this.


31 posted on 05/06/2013 11:22:11 AM PDT by TexasGunLover ("Either you're with us or you're with the terrorists."-- President George W. Bush)
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To: MeneMeneTekelUpharsin

Take heed what you say of your senior..
Be your word spoken or plain
Lest a bird of the air tell the matter
and so ye shall hear it again


32 posted on 05/06/2013 11:22:36 AM PDT by Oldexpat
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To: kiryandil
Never assume ANY form of electronic communications is secure. Ever.
33 posted on 05/06/2013 11:23:16 AM PDT by null and void (CA State Moto: "We have no idea right now where they were going or where they were coming from")
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To: mnehring

“The storage capacity of the Utah Data Center will be measured in “zettabytes”. What exactly is a zettabyte? There are a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte; a thousand terabytes in a petabyte; a thousand petabytes in an exabyte; and a thousand exabytes in a zettabyte.”


34 posted on 05/06/2013 11:23:33 AM PDT by Rennes Templar (If guns kill people, how come no one dies at gun shows?)
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To: kiryandil
I had a feeling that my conversations were being recorded.

That is why I used to pepper my conversations with words like "Clinton bombing," followed by, "I sure hope I just tripped a wire."

Maybe they have me down as a harmless crackpot.

35 posted on 05/06/2013 11:25:18 AM PDT by Slyfox (The red face of shame is proof that the conscience is still operational.)
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To: kiryandil

My wife is on the phone 5 hrs. a day I bet they get tired of listening to her.


36 posted on 05/06/2013 11:26:08 AM PDT by Venturer
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To: svcw
Where are these super servers storing all this information?
Really is there enough memory in the universe to store all the data?

Voice compresses very well - it's not music. Gaps between words take almost nothing to store, and much of the dynamic range can get compressed away without losing the meaning of the content. Further, speech recognition can be used to create a searchable index so that they can find specific calls and then pull up the recording itself to review further.

Echelon, I think it's called.

Government has been building huge data storage systems for many years.

Just sayin'
37 posted on 05/06/2013 11:27:38 AM PDT by tpmintx (Gun free zones are hunting preserves for unarmed people.)
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To: Buckeye McFrog
Or pick some agreed upon day when everybody will call a friend at 3:30PM Eastern Time, say the word "bomb" and hang-up...

Bomb! Japan has just flashed Pearl Bailey, I mean...

38 posted on 05/06/2013 11:27:39 AM PDT by null and void (CA State Moto: "We have no idea right now where they were going or where they were coming from")
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To: sten

See link in 22. 3 billion phone calls per day or almost 35 thousand per second.

Average length of phone call is 3 minutes according to this:
http://adraughtofvintage.com/2012/05/07/average-length-of-local-cell-phone-call-in-2003-was-3-min-in-2010-its-1-min-47-sec/

Just playing around.... So we have 35K calls per second * 3 minutes per call on an average is 105K Minutes of recording per second.

16.4kb per minute of storage * 105K minutes = 1,722,000kb per second (9.5GB per second)

9.5GB per second * 60 seconds per minute = 570GB per minute * 60 minutes per hour = 34 TB/Hour (rounded)
= 816 TB per day
= 25K TB per month
= 293K TB per year

It sounds like a lot but it isn’t as bad as I first thought.

IBM already has a 120 Petabyte drive that is public.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/425237/ibm-builds-biggest-data-drive-ever/

So under 300 of those drives for a year’s conversations.


39 posted on 05/06/2013 11:28:34 AM PDT by mnehring
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To: Buckeye McFrog

Absolutely correct. Recall Clinton’s comments to Monica - he knew everything in this country was being monitored by another “friendly” Government.


40 posted on 05/06/2013 11:31:35 AM PDT by LibertyOh
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