Merkel reportedly gets NSA-proof phone with chip costing 2.5k euros

Russia Today ^ | June 26, 2014

[ßuddaßudd]

I want to believe the germans are smart enough the design and build that chip,,, but maybe not...

[Tallguy]

“I want to believe the germans are smart enough the design and build that chip,,, but maybe not...”

I remember reading a story about the CIA discovering that the Kremlin was buying some heavy, Mercedes-Benz limos through a front company. They entered the Daimler-Benz plant where the cars were being assembled (hand-built) and basically bugged the vehicles. They were hoping some big-wigs would be using the vehicles. Turned out that they were used by Brezhnev & Andropov.

Makes you wonder how many crypto developments aren’t penetrated by the NSA before the first chip is fabricated?

[koanhead]

I'm glad I'm not the only one doing that math. I was just calculating phone calls in the US and assuming 4 calls per day and came up with less than one hard disk a month. Now, that will get boosted considerably if you include as metadata full tracking of the location of every cell phone (based on either GPS or cell tower power and direction).

Actually, adding location data wouldn't boost the storage requirements all that much. If we allow eight bytes each for latitude and longitude (three digits, notwithstanding the fact that only logitude ever needs the third one, plus four more after the decimal point, plus a byte for storing the "N-S" or "E-W" flag, which is even more bloated than allocating a full byte per decimal digit as I've been doing), that just pumps up the requirement per call from 64 to 80 bytes -- increase the above storage requirements by 25% and it's covered.

The ultimate point, of course, is that they're clearly sweeping up call content (which does use quite a bit of storage even with efficient compression), not just "metadata", en masse.

[koanhead]

Addendum: That amount of location data is sufficient to specify any point on earth to within about 100 meters. If you need to pin it down to 1 meter, add four more bytes (two more significant digits for each coordinate, with the same inefficient one-decimal-digit-per-byte coding I’ve been using to err on the high side) and increase the figures by 35% instead of 25%.

[koanhead]

I remember reading a story about the CIA discovering that the Kremlin was buying some heavy, Mercedes-Benz limos through a front company. They entered the Daimler-Benz plant where the cars were being assembled (hand-built) and basically bugged the vehicles. They were hoping some big-wigs would be using the vehicles. Turned out that they were used by Brezhnev & Andropov.

Amusing, but given the snake pit of Party-Army-KGB infighting that went on in behind-the-scenes Soviet politics the bugs may have proven even more useful than expected....

[ADemocratNoMore]

As memory serves, I recall a report by some Congressional committee from a few years ago that said the US intell infrastructure was generating in the neighborhood of 4 petabytes per month! (although that might have been per year, still a very large bucket ‘o bits).

[koanhead]

Gah, that came out garbled. The idea is that who knows who else might have had the cars bugged as part of the operation.

[ßuddaßudd]

Using wikipedia,, Germany has at least 11 fabs,, I believe they’ll be able to make what they need by themselves..

[KarlInOhio]

The big increase I was talking about was not storing locaton only at the beginning and end of a phone call, but every time the cell phone pings a tower. I don't know how often that happens, but I expect that it is at least once a minute just to keep the phone company informed of where to route an incoming call. The NSA would probably count tracking the location of every cell phone in the country 24 hours a day as "mere metadata". 6 bytes will store your location to a ten foot accuracy. Do that once a minute for 200 million cell phones will result in 1.7 terabytes a day.

And all of that can be waved off as just metadata.

[pluvmantelo]

Betcha the BND will hear every syllable.

[FreedomPoster]

Still, 4T drives are common these days; that’s a 1000 (or 1024) of them.

When your budget is the NSA’s, even assuming multiple redundancies of the data store on RAID, several 1000 drives per month is nothing.

And people have some really neat answers for cheap storage these days. The BackBlaze Pod is up to V 4.0. $0.051 / GB.

http://blog.backblaze.com/2014/03/19/backblaze-storage-pod-4/

I’m sure the government is using more expensive answers, but still, it shows what can be done.