US looks at ways to prevent spying on NSA spying

Pioneer Press ^ | 1-28-14 | STEPHEN BRAUN

[TurboZamboni]

WASHINGTON—As the Obama administration considers ending the storage of millions of phone records by the National Security Agency, the government is quietly funding research to prevent eavesdroppers from seeing whom the U.S. is spying on, The Associated Press has learned. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has paid at least five research teams across the country to develop a system for high-volume, encrypted searches of electronic records kept outside the government's possession. The project is among several ideas that could allow the government to store Americans' phone records with phone companies or a third-party organization, but still search them as needed.

Under the research, U.S. data mining would be shielded by secret coding that could conceal identifying details from outsiders and even the owners of the targeted databases, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press and interviews with researchers, corporate executives and government officials.

The administration has provided only vague descriptions about changes it is considering to the NSA's daily collection and storage of Americans' phone records, which are presently kept in NSA databanks. To resolve legal, privacy and civil liberties concerns, President Barack Obama this month ordered the attorney general and senior intelligence officials to recommend changes by March 28 that would allow the U.S. to identify suspected terrorists' phone calls without the government itself holding the phone records.

[txrefugee]

And today we find out that the NSA accessed the Angry Birds and Google Maps to spy on us. We no longer believe those in charge.

[TurboZamboni]

The Boston bombers and Major Hasan must not have played Angry Birds.

[afsnco]

I think this whole NSA thing is blackmail writ large, at least regarding the Repubs. They’ve let the Repubs know in an unsubtle way that they know about all their clandestine affairs and underhanded dealings. That pretty much explains why they’re rolling over and playing dead about NSA, Benghazi, Obamacare, etc.

Cruz must be the only elected official in government that doesn’t have skeletons (or else he doesn’t care).

[CPOSharky]

Don’t the phone companies store all the “meta-data” each call produces? The data is on each phone bill.

Or does that mean that NSA is collecting much more data than they are admitting to?

[KarlInOhio]

The Boston bombers and Major Hasan must not have played Angry Birds.

Or they weren't on Obama's enemies list.

[KarlInOhio]

Don’t the phone companies store all the “meta-data” each call produces? The data is on each phone bill.

Every time your cell phone pings the local tower to see if it should be moved to a new cell generates some type of records for the phone company. The phone company has no real need to keep track that you were approximately 6 miles south-west of tower 19388 at 9:53am, but moved closer to tower 21917 at 9:55pm more than a couple of minutes after the switch. (And even more accurate data if they are getting GPS info from your phone) Recording and permanently storing every one of those costs them money and other than some aggregate data to decide where to put more towers or antennas on the current tower doesn't give them anything. But the NSA and police would love to have a permanent map of the path your cell phone took each and every day.

[King Graymung]

Or does that mean that NSA is collecting much more data than they are admitting to?

Of course the NSA is collecting much more data that they are admitting to. Simple artithmetic shows that.

The "metadata" for a phone call -- the phone number of the caller and the called, the time of the call, the duration of the call -- amounts to a few bytes of data per call. To err on the generous side, call it 128 bytes, or 8 calls per kilobyte. If ten trillion calls are made every year -- that's an average of four calls per day by everyone on earth, including infants, deaf-mutes, and people who would think that the strange little box has a magic demon inside it if you showed them a phone -- that's about 1250 terabytes of phone "metadata". Stored on standard portable hard drives like you can get at Best Buy, that would cost maybe $60,000 and fit in a 20-gallon plastic bin.

Obviously, the NSA is collecting and storing much more than that.