Posted on 12/04/2013 1:00:33 PM PST by Nachum
The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.
The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool.
The NSA does not target Americans’ location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones “incidentally,” a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result.
One senior collection manager, speaking on condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said “we are getting vast volumes” of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. Additionally, data is often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year.
In scale, scope and potential impact on privacy, the efforts to collect and analyze location data may be unsurpassed among the NSA surveillance programs that have been disclosed since June. Analysts can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among individuals using them.
U.S. officials said the programs that collect and analyze location data are lawful and intended strictly to develop intelligence about foreign targets.
Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
The NSA has been around a lot longer than Obama and his cronies ... :-) ...
Ok let me be clear, the main reason I have my case is so I have no one listening to my conversations or viewing my meetings. When I pull it out of the case it reconnects to the network and the texts , emails and voicemails are loaded. Simple as that, if you have an iPhone and don’t turn of the network they can hear everything you say and record everything you do even when it’s turned off. Thanks for all the advice .
They know everything about us, yet we still have no proof of where Ubama was born.
I am not sure I understand your point. NSA uses applications too, no? Databases? Interfaces? Are you saying healthcare.gov’s only problem is lack of security? Sorry, I don’t understand what you are saying. P.S., I’ve worked in IT for 25 years.
“most people in application development don’t develop in languages they actually know”
Haha, pretty true. They probably know some kind of related language though. So it’s kind of like if everyone writing novels in Spanish was really only fluent in Latin and muddled through it with Babel Fish and online dictionaries.
I see where there is serious talk in Utah about cutting off water and utilities serving that massive NSA Data Center.
The popcorn machine is REALLY getting hot now.
Unless you jailbreak your iPhone, that’s not going to happen. And if you think someone else has jailbroken it, you can completely erase everything and reload directly from Apple. And, by the way, you shouldn’t jailbreak the phone, since it takes away the protections that Apple has put up to prevent others from doing this to you - and it voids the warranty, too.
Very simply put, that is not going to happen on an iPhone, unless you let someone have it for a whole and they did something to the phone, without you knowing it. And’ if so, you can solve that problem by completing reloading the iOS (operating system).
Did you watch the video at the site I linked in the post above? I suggest you take a look. I am aware of several cheap apps I can load on your phone in a few moments that will grant me access. I don’t want to dispute you if you feel safe I am happy for you. I on the other hand am not and take steps to protect my private conversations. I admit I am paranoid.
There is a reason top exec’s , political people, and celebrities leave their phones in the lobby before meetings.
If you have an iPhone, and if you have not jailbroken it (which you should not do because you will end up overriding Apple’s protections) - you then know that you can’t download any such (even “cheap”) app from Apple’s App Store - without signing in with the owner’s password (you should have a strong password, too).
AND ... Apple does not have any such spyware, where this can be done. It’s ONLY JAILBROKEN iPHONES that can have that, and you should NEVER jailbreak your iPhone for security reasons!
See this one discussion at the Apple website ...
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5070810
NOW ... mind you ... I’m not talking about the Android phones - which ARE INSECURE or the other phones on the market. You CAN do it with those other phones — but NOT on a NON-JAILBROKEN iPHONE.
I appreciate you insight. Have a great night.
Crosslink
You actually trust Apple to not cave to the NSA? If anything it is the most bugged phone due to the popularity.
Recording and transmitting conversations in the background is nothing for these phones. I frequently use my phone’s recorder for hours at a time and barely any power is consumed. The data files are so small that an entire day can be transmitted in seconds.
Recording and transmitting every phone call would be nothing to them. 24/7 recording would not even be that hard. They can even use voice recognition in real time and get alerted to targets. Believe me, if it can be done they are doing it and the fallout would be huge if all the spying was made public.
I agree and that is why I have the privacy case.
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/10/proof-that-nsa-spying-is-not-really-focused-on-terrorism.html
Here is the link I was trying to share, sorry.
Your original post I took to mean that they could not build a health care website insinuating that they were incompetent. I was making the point that IT security and application development are not the same and are often, unfortunately, two completely separate worlds.
Here’s a great video on the algorithm applications already in use. The part about psychological patterns is very telling. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_aLU-NOdHM
With an iPhone that is not jailbroken (and you should never do that for security reasons), there is only one place you can get an app - the Apple App Store.
If you try to go to a website and download some program - it won’t happen. You simply can’t do it. You can’t get an app on the iPhone, except through the App Store. And there good reason for doing it that way.
Now, please tell me what the name of that app is - in the App Store - that is the spy program, so I can take a look at it. If it’s not there, you can’t get it on the iPhone any other way.
The apps are also “sandboxed” so that they are locked up in their own compartment and can’t break out of it. So ... if some app “got sneaky” in the App Store and hid some code in it (that got past the Apple inspectors), it couldn’t operate outside of its own “sandbox” and it couldn’t affect other parts and operation of the iPhone. It could only operate within it’s own little box and couldn’t affect other parts of the iOS.
NOW ... if you know of some example of an app breaking out of its sandbox (in the Apple iOS) — I sure would like to see that. Please provide a link to that information, so I can follow up on it.
However, you really seem to be saying to me (and the others here) that although we may not know about it, and although all the security researchers in the world (who look for this kind of stuff) haven’t found it — that the NSA “must really have it even though we know nothing about it”. And even though there is no shown vector by which it can even be accomplished. [ ... and, mind you, I’m talking specifically about the iPhone and it’s iOS.]
Sorry, I just don’t go on the basis of drug-fueled and whacko conspiracy theories — but on real-world proof and demonstrated capability.
Let me say it one other way to demonstrate what you are really saying. It’s like saying that we know how our solar system works and how the earth rotates on it’s axis and how it revolves around the sun. We know that information, have studied it, measured it and analyzed it to no end.
So, with all that analysis, we’re confident to an absolute certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. However, you come along and say, “How do you know that a cabal of scientists haven’t created the ultimate machine which can stop the earth from rotating and make it so that the sun doesn’t rise tomorrow morning?”
I say that with all that I know and others know that this is impossible.
Your retort is ... “Are you telling me that you don’t believe that the government can create some super-secret organization of scientists to do that? You can go on believing your fairy tales, while I know it’s possible and maybe even probable that the government has that capability right now!”
THAT is precisely what you sound like in this conversation ... :-) ...
The kind of “reasoning” that is being used here to justify using this box that you use — can also be used in the same way to say that the NSA already knows about this box and has figured out how to bypass it and record you anyway — in spite of the fact that you’re using it ... :-) ...
All together now! Snowden is a traitor! /s
It doesn’t matter what the user interface on the device restricts you to. NSA is well known for “convincing” popular developers to install back doors and cripple security. Unless you can analyze every source code and piece of hardware in the device, you’ll never know. And even then, it could be cleverly hidden. Every version of Windows, Office and Lotus since 1998 was recently revealed to have been left open for surveillance.
They don’t even need to have the system within your phone for picking up every phone call. Everything can be picked up along the backbone and it was recently revealed the NSA installs black server rooms at backbone providers.
And the NSA is watching you through your TV screen right now ... LOL ...[ And don’t tell me they can’t do it or are not doing it ... :-) ... ]
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