Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access To Trillions of US Phone Records (wired.com) 104
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A little-known surveillance program tracks more than a trillion domestic phone records within the United States each year, according to a letter WIRED obtained that was sent by US senator Ron Wyden to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Sunday, challenging the program's legality. According to the letter, a surveillance program now known as Data Analytical Services (DAS) has for more than a decade allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to mine the details of Americans' calls, analyzing the phone records of countless people who are not suspected of any crime, including victims. Using a technique known as chain analysis, the program targets not only those in direct phone contact with a criminal suspect but anyone with whom those individuals have been in contact as well.
The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs' departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has, for the past decade, provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T's infrastructure -- a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States. In a letter to US attorney general Merrick Garland on Sunday, Wyden wrote that he had "serious concerns about the legality" of the DAS program, adding that "troubling information" he'd received "would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress." That information, which Wyden says the DOJ confidentially provided to him, is considered "sensitive but unclassified" by the US government, meaning that while it poses no risk to national security, federal officials, like Wyden, are forbidden from disclosing it to the public, according to the senator's letter. AT&T spokesperson Kim Hart Jonson said only that the company is required by law to comply with a lawful subpoena. However, "there is no law requiring AT&T to store decades' worth of Americans' call records for law enforcement purposes," notes Wired. "Documents reviewed by WIRED show that AT&T officials have attended law enforcement conferences in Texas as recently as 2018 to train police officials on how best to utilize AT&T's voluntary, albeit revenue-generating, assistance."
"The collection of call record data under DAS is not wiretapping, which on US soil requires a warrant based on probable cause. Call records stored by AT&T do not include recordings of any conversations. Instead, the records include a range of identifying information, such as the caller and recipient's names, phone numbers, and the dates and times they placed calls, for six months or more at a time." It's unclear exactly how far back the call records accessible under DAS go, although a slide deck released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2014 states that they can be queried for up to 10 years.
The DAS program, formerly known as Hemisphere, is run in coordination with the telecom giant AT&T, which captures and conducts analysis of US call records for law enforcement agencies, from local police and sheriffs' departments to US customs offices and postal inspectors across the country, according to a White House memo reviewed by WIRED. Records show that the White House has, for the past decade, provided more than $6 million to the program, which allows the targeting of the records of any calls that use AT&T's infrastructure -- a maze of routers and switches that crisscross the United States. In a letter to US attorney general Merrick Garland on Sunday, Wyden wrote that he had "serious concerns about the legality" of the DAS program, adding that "troubling information" he'd received "would justifiably outrage many Americans and other members of Congress." That information, which Wyden says the DOJ confidentially provided to him, is considered "sensitive but unclassified" by the US government, meaning that while it poses no risk to national security, federal officials, like Wyden, are forbidden from disclosing it to the public, according to the senator's letter. AT&T spokesperson Kim Hart Jonson said only that the company is required by law to comply with a lawful subpoena. However, "there is no law requiring AT&T to store decades' worth of Americans' call records for law enforcement purposes," notes Wired. "Documents reviewed by WIRED show that AT&T officials have attended law enforcement conferences in Texas as recently as 2018 to train police officials on how best to utilize AT&T's voluntary, albeit revenue-generating, assistance."
"The collection of call record data under DAS is not wiretapping, which on US soil requires a warrant based on probable cause. Call records stored by AT&T do not include recordings of any conversations. Instead, the records include a range of identifying information, such as the caller and recipient's names, phone numbers, and the dates and times they placed calls, for six months or more at a time." It's unclear exactly how far back the call records accessible under DAS go, although a slide deck released under the Freedom of Information Act in 2014 states that they can be queried for up to 10 years.
we learned nothing from snowden (Score:4, Insightful)
So here it is, a few years down the line and we are supposed to be shocked, just shocked that our government is comprised of various vile, evil organizations that sorely need some transparency in these (all) matters.
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Anyway:
Secretive White House Surveillance Program Gives Cops Access To Trillions of US
I didn't know there were more than one US. Maybe the United Arab Emirates could count as a US but I seriously doubt there are trillions!
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Records, headline wasn't edited
Ashtar Command calling (Score:2)
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Hilariously, your post isn't descriptive of any one particular political situation in the US at this time.
Old program renamed every few years (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:we learned nothing from snowden (Score:4, Funny)
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Pen trace (Score:5, Informative)
Prior to this "digital era" recordation of WHO called WHOM and WHEN and for HOW LONG was called a pen-trace and didn't include content recording. These do not require a warrant alleging criminal violations in particularity as per fourth amendment law.
In thie "digital era" we have CDR (call data records) containing at least that data, No 4th am restrictions there.
The US government has bent over backward to ignore, forestall, and work around any restrictions in collecting either "pen trace" (CDR) data or content. Between this and the 3rd party rules of acquiring data, the US government has trampled our laws and rights into the ground.
Good on Senator Wyden. Fuck AT&T for being the government's bitch, and fuck the government for weaseling around constitutional restrictions to acquire information they have no REASON, KNOWLEDGE, or BASIS to have.
Re:Pen trace (Score:4, Interesting)
Pen trace orders were historically real time, meaning, you served it on the telco and you got the metadata on all calls from that point on. You didn't get the ten years preceding, much less ten years preceding on all the lines your target called.
No law requires them to retain this data. It's worth looking at what Apple makes available to law enforcement [apple.com] regarding FaceTime, which can be used (via FaceTime audio) as a phone call replacement. In brief, 25 days of "call invitation logs"; they do not log if the call was successful or how long it lasted. Only that an attempt was made. Of course, FaceTime operates on well known ports, in a peer to peer model, so, smart money is AT&T probably has logs of that too. Bastards.
Its your phone bill, it might be regulated (Score:2)
No law requires them to retain this data.
This data is essentially your phone company bill. Retention may be regulated.
Re:Its your phone bill, it might be regulated (Score:5, Insightful)
My employer is a CLEC in several states.
ATT is doing this because they can charge law enforcement for the access. It's a revenue stream.
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Let's be completely honest here... It's also invaluable for statistical traffic engineering purposes isn't it... And has been since day one.
Ma Bell collected this type of data in Ye olden dayes and continued to do so LONG after the breakup as the baby bells.
Only micky mouse telcos didn't don't collect, store and analyze this type of data.
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Telcos absolutely DID and DO record each and every CDR, barring accidents.
Call detail records are how they generate bills and manage traffic models.
Or did you think phone bills were just invoices?
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CDRs are kept explicitly for invoicing.
Traffic engineering is a trivial problem in modern packetized voice networks.
The capacity of your terminating PBXs and soft switches is known, and everything in the middle is just moving bits around according to layer-3 headers.
We do not use CDR for this purpose. Stop spreading this untruth.
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I CAN speak about over 20 years ago.... And as recently as 5 years ago. CDRs are how the stats are derived.
As I said... Only mickey mouse operations don't do this.
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And CDRs aren't the audio content of the call. Just start time, end time, originating number and destination number.
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to quote someone else on this thread, do you have ANY idea how much storage that would take?! For what is in effect mostly worthless crap.
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1. it is done. 2. it's not live storage. 3. it is racks of DVD-BD burners. 4. I'd wager it's speech to text now and saved as text that can be indexed instead.
Pictures where all over when the story broke out 10-15 years ago.
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The question is as to retention.
If you think VOIP traffic (all modern phone connections are SIP trunks) requires traffic engineering from CDR data, you grossly overestimate the bandwidth required for a phone call.
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bandwidth has nothing to do with call detail records. CDRs are at the most basic, start time, stop time calling number and called number. They tend to not be monolithic, but rather "pulse records" i.e. a start record, in-progress records, other call event records and a stop record. This protects call records, as much as they can be, against data loss.
If a switch restart record is seen, all records for that switch have a call end record synthesized
I actually trained as a traffic engineer years ago. VOIP
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bandwidth has nothing to do with call detail records.
You said call records have to do with traffic engineering.
Traffic engineering today has nothing to do with anything other than bandwidth, because all voice traffic is packetized over SIP trunks, now.
CDRs are at the most basic, start time, stop time calling number and called number.
I know exactly what CDRs are.
I work for a CLEC.
If a switch restart record is seen, all records for that switch have a call end record synthesized
Yes... they do... what is your point?
Call-ends are synthesized for anything that will lead to a non-natural termination of a call.
I actually trained as a traffic engineer years ago. VOIP calls (SIP, H.323, MGCP or any other) conforms exactly to the mathematical probabilities inherent in call queuing analysis... And I understand EXACTLY the bandwidth requirements for VOIP calls, and the dependencies on the codecs used.
That's adorable. I am an engineer who deals with with the "traffic engineering" requirements in a commercial business that providers
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Needed? No, but it's how they do it's done because that it's simpler that finding "new kewl" ways to do it
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The plain and simple fact is that the new kids on the block worry about having "bell shaped heads" so they miss the simplest things.
Yes, packetized voice IS about bandwidth. AND we know that for a given CODEC, X-number of simultaneous calls can be carried... AND there is a traffic engineering factor known as peakedness that has to be accounted for. And the non-bell-shapped heads like to ignore such niceties and as a result run crap networks.
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AND we know that for a given CODEC, X-number of simultaneous calls can be carried...
You're still thinking like a circuit-switched network operator.
First, let's for simplicity's sake say that we can measure all of our links as X DS0s of call capacity.
In a circuit-switched network (like the PSTN), attempting to put X+1 calls on that link will simply not work. It cannot work.
In a packet-switched network, you absolutely can.
The cost will be that you must lose 1/DS0 capacity of link worth of bits, which can be distributed evenly.
AND there is a traffic engineering factor known as peakedness that has to be accounted for.
Na. We handle that with bandwidth graphs, and the ability to q
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It's not.
WHO, WHOM, WHEN, HOW LONG info is your phone bill.
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FBI completely open in the 1990s about meta data (Score:2)
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Retention may be regulated.
We are in no way required to maintain non-billable CDR data.
Even if your bill generally shows you all your calls, that's just a common practice.
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It's not was in reference to:
Retention may be regulated.
We are in no way required to maintain non-billable CDR data. Even if your bill generally shows you all your calls, that's just a common practice.
No, it's essential for a company wrt designing and maintaining their own network. Determining seasonality. Analyzing changing needs during local emergencies, changing needs over time. The call info is also essentially expected by customers. If you can't show precisely where the billable minutes are you will likely lose many customers.
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I've designed multiple CLEC networks.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
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Nonsense. I've designed multiple CLEC networks. You have no idea what you're talking about.
Untrue. I've worked on equipment for baby bells. Call routing and accounting data was quite important to them. Things might be different for some of the lower end companies that come and go and have to take shortcuts to be competitive.
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There is precisely zero need for CDR data when looking at the capacity and usage of every segment of path.
Managing this network becomes just like managing any other IP network. You don't need netflow to do that.
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No law requires them to retain this data.
If they were compelled to retain it, you wouldn't even be allowed to know [aclu.org], let alone to know what they were recording, who was accessing it, or why.
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No law requires them to retain this data.
More importantly, no law prevents them from retaining this data beyond what is required for functionality (billing/operations/etc.) This is what the Senator should focus on.
Anything else is just making noise for campaign purposes.
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Fuck AT&T for being the government's bitch
"voluntary, albeit revenue-generating, assistance"
Yeah, it's amazing that any company would agree to such terms.
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Re:Pen trace (Score:4, Informative)
Fuck AT&T for being the government's bitch
Never forget QWest [wikipedia.org].
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Hey, if you want, there are other boxes.
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All true, but who's making phone calls any more? All you'd get off me is me talking to my ISP to get my service fixed, me taking a call from a spam number, and maybe, just maybe talking to my bank.
If you got my whatsapp/signal/telegram conversations (or even meta data) you might get something a bit more interesting... (and yes, I realise there are even less legal protections on that meta data).
So... (Score:2)
Basically, the fuckers outsourced PRISM and all the other shit that Snowden exposed.
That figures.
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Basically, the fuckers outsourced PRISM and all the other shit that Snowden exposed.
That figures.
That presumes that this is a new program, but we have literally been hearing about "secret AT&T switching rooms" that provide data to US govt spy agencies for decades.
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That presumes that this is a new program, but we have literally been hearing about "secret AT&T switching rooms" that provide data to US govt spy agencies for decades.
Yes, this is more like the precursor to PRISM.
Now, show of hands, who believes only metadata is being stored today? Disk space is cheap, and AMR compressed phone calls are small.
But they can't Stop Spam Calls? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But they can't Stop Spam Calls? (Score:5, Insightful)
So AT&T can capture data on just about every phone call made over their network but they can't stop Spam calls. Rightttttttttttttttt.
They get paid for spam calls. What did you think they were going to do?
exponential prices (Score:3)
>> They get paid for spam calls. What did you think they were going to do?
Simple : they should charge the scammers exponential prices for those calls.
Ulta LLM (Score:2)
They are just doing some AI training. Relax. Just let it happen. You can't stop it. We voted for it, remember?
Re:Ulta LLM (Score:4, Funny)
The US constitution should had a "purge all parties" nuclear option for cases when there's only two and they have a completely different opinion from the general population.
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The US constitution should had a "purge all parties" nuclear option for cases when there's only two and they have a completely different opinion from the general population.
What good would that do?
They'd just instantly re-form. No even the actually useful reform, where they get better. They'd just form again same as they are now. How do you propose to stop them?
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I'd suggest different reforms.
Ban warchest spending. All candidates get the same fixed budget for their campaign. No pressure groups or special interest groups permitted to campaign.
Clarify the 14th to include the presidency and to allow courts to make the decision, both in elections and primaries.
Have a vote option "re-open nominations" and leave the position vacant if the RON option wins until there's an election where RON loses.
Also, ban having the President and VP on a combined ticket. One election for
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All candidates get the same fixed budget for their campaign.
Just to be clear, you are saying that the Nazi Party of America gets the same public funding as the Democrats and Republicans?
What if 10,000 people register to run, each advocating racist and Fascist policies? Do they each get the same funding as the one Democrat and one Republican?
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Trump is currently running with racist and Fascist policies. The problem is that his billionaire supporters are trying to get him to drown out all the alternatives.
10,000 political parties that are forced to actually make a case would be substantially better for democracy than one candidate whose spending is so prolific that they needn't make any case at all.
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Have a vote option "re-open nominations" and leave the position vacant if the RON option wins until there's an election where RON loses.
...And ban all of the candidates who had their hats in the ring when RON won from being a candidate for rest of this and the following election cycle for the position they attempting to win. Meaning, if you're a candidate for a US. Senatorial seat, and RON wins, you are banned from candidacy for any elected position in this election and from candidacy for any other elected position for 6 years.
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So you would prevent me from financially supporting the candidate of my choice, if that candidate was wildly popular, and attracted many contributions before I could send mine?
Smells like, well, you can guess. Stinky.
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If your candidate's arguments are strong, then they shouldn't need to drown out the opposition.
If your candidate's arguments are weak, then it is to the detriment of democracy and the nation if they drown out the opposition.
Supporting with money is not real support at all. It is an attempt to close down those who might have a better case.
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My word, that is a weak argument. If my preferred candidate's arguments are weak, or more likely they are unacceptable to others, no amount of money fixes that. But, but, if my preferred candidate's arguments gain no support, my preferred candidate gains no money, and the question is moot.
Really, while money can 'buy votes', it rarely elevates an unpopular candidate. There are many examples of elections where the money spent on campaigns was not matched by the votes gained.
And I, for one, when I donate to a
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They'd just instantly re-form.
Simple solution: Require the new parties to scramble the party platforms from the disbanded parties.
There is no particular reason that the party that is pro-choice on abortion should be pro-union, or for gun control, or environmentalist. Logically, those issues have nothing to do with each other.
Keep randomly rearranging the positions until we get a party that aligns with the majority's views.
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Re: Ulta LLM (Score:2)
It is likely you will get the choice of 4 parties this year, vote for RFK or Manchin if you want to see reform in the parties. Both of the mainstream parties are currently eating themselves due to extreme sides in the party looking for control, instead the candidates should want to appeal to independents and libertarians instead.
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The US constitution should had a "purge all parties" nuclear option for cases when there's only two and they have a completely different opinion from the general population.
All that would accomplish is that a new set of corrupt officials will move in. We see this all the time in the third world, populist gets elected, starts putting his people in positions of power and uses them to make it difficult to remove said populist.
Nashville Christmas Bombing (Score:3)
This was allegedly why the Nashville AT&T facility was bombed on Christmas 2020.
But follow-up got sidelined:
Posted at 5:43 PM, Jan 05, 2021
Yeah...
I have seen this show. (Score:2)
You are being watched. The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day...
And it was good. Too bad it didn't remain fiction.
They're defined as 'business records' (Score:3)
They're defined as 'business records', and there is no law currently on the books that prevents at&t (and any other business that has records) from offering them to the government at a price.
As for who is responsible for this: the answer is the U.S. Congress is responsible for this.
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It sounds like congress wasn't aware of this particular form of spying.
From the article;
That information, which Wyden says the DOJ confidentially provided to him, is considered “sensitive but unclassified” by the US government, meaning that, while it poses no risk to national security, federal officials, like Wyden, are forbidden from disclosing it to the public, according to the senator’s letter.
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Apparently, because the metadata is AT&T's and they're quite happy to sell it to the government for some extra revenue.
Your businesses would rape you in the public square if it paid, and your government would declare it legal if there was enough money involved.
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That is why the US needs to stop being massively behind on civil liberties and get something akin to the GDPR. Because with the GDPR, using these records for anything but their primary purpose is a criminal act, as is keeping them longer than absolutely necessary.
AT&T has captured all call records for decades (Score:5, Informative)
I worked for AT&T back in the 80's. Their gear captured all call records all the time and saved them off onto Unix computers. I worked on software that gathered up aspects of it and provided the ability to do queries. Things like "every single thing that happened related to this phone number for the past month" was easy to do.
This was back in the days of analogue handsets. If you picked the phone up off the hook and got a dialtone, that action was recorded. If you then dialed (or punched) a couple of numbers and set the phone back down, that was recorded. Any numbers calling in, call durations, etc. Audio data (the voices) was filtered, digitized, compressed to low bandwidth, sent over X.25 networks, decoded back to audio at the destination, and sent to the destination phone. It would have been trivial to store the digitized audio as well, and I expect that sometimes they did.
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If you can find the city permits for the newer telco buildings built since the mid 1950s you will find a very large room named "tape room" in them. Those were often used for ADSL equipment until recently but by the early 1980s they would have enough equipment to record any call going through the place with a warrant.
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Southwestern Bell, or SBC.
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I worked for AT&T post-breakup, when much of the company had already divided into Baby Bells. The equipment remained the same. I expect that the same exact data is being collected even now in situations where people have old-fashioned landline phones. These days when almost everyone has a cell phone they probably can't know when you bring up the phone app and press a finger on a number, but they sure do know and record who you called when, and approximately where you were located. It would be trivially
Re:AT&T has captured all call records for deca (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked for Burroughs in the previous century. One of the things I maintained in the 70's was their head-per-track disks for the phone company.
http://s3data.computerhistory.... [computerhistory.org]
They stored logs of every call made for origination and destination numbers and timestamped.
It was a secret kept from local authorities because " we don't want to get involved in discovery requests from every divorce lawyer in the state."
I don't know if these records were ever shared with the Feds' three letter agencies, but as far as we knew, there was no official requests for those numbers.
MCI Friends and Family (Score:2)
Remember when people were pissed that their friend or family member gave MCI their number and then MCI called them pitching a closed friends network with perks in long-distance rates.
Pepperi.....yeah, I'm goin' out to pasture.
Always has been (Score:2)
In the U.S. there has been a spy program associated with every form of electronic communication we ever had, starting with telegrams.
What's different about DAS is how this federal program is being made user-friendly for local police forces.
https://www.vice.com/en/articl... [vice.com]
Trillion of US (Score:2)
I really believed that the US were about 50.
In chinese USA, phone listens to you (Score:2)
Sounds like any fascist's wet dream.
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The FBI has arrested a Miami Police officer who used traffic stops to steal money and drugs from people he thought were suspects but who turned out to be undercover agents, officials said. Officer Frenel Cenat, 40, was arrested Thursday on charges including attempted Hobbs Act extortion, theft of government funds, and attempted possession with intent to distribute cocaine, jail and court records showed According to an arrest affidavit, Cenat has been a Miami Police officer since September 2008 and since 2020 had worked for the property and evidence unit. The FBI began their investigation into him after a confidential source told them Cenat had previously conducted traffic stops of people known to have just engaged in drug transactions to steal the money or drugs they were transporting, the affidavit said. Cenat would use his official police vehicle to conduct the traffic stops and would be in his police uniform, the affidavit said. Cenat was recorded on video and audio "coordinating schemes and conducting traffic stops of two individuals who he was told had just engaged in drug transactions, with the intention of stealing the money and/or drugs involved in those illegal transactions," the affidavit said..
https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/... [nbcmiami.com]
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Would be plausible. At least it has gotten very easy for those with criminal intent to join some US police force and get access to all these nice assets a freelance criminal can only dream of ...
Social network analysis (Score:2)
The math doesn't add up (Score:1)
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Notwithstanding the story itself, the math doesn't add up. They talk about "trillions" of phone records every year. In a "best case" scenario, assuming they only mean 1 trillion, and that every man, woman, and child in the US had a phone, that would mean about 333 million phones. 1 trillion / 333 million = 3000 phone calls per year per phone. That's more than 8 calls a day, every day, for a year, including even toddlers. And two people are involved in every phone call, so that would mean the average person is on 16 calls a day. Not even the most phone-addicted person I know sustains that kind of activity, let alone it being an average. And the article does refer to this as being "call records", so that sounds like voice calls to me. Now, if this included texts, I could definitely understand that the numbers make more sense, so that's definitely a possibility.... but even then, AT&T would be able to intercept information easily only from SMS messages, not iMessage or other encrypted methods of communication.
Maybe somebody from the CCP could provide a breakdown.
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Documents released under public records laws show the DAS program has been used to produce location information on criminal suspects and their known associates, a practice deemed unconstitutional without a warrant in 2018.
AT&T could keep your location every time you send or receive data, not only when you make or receive calls. Or just every time you connect to a different cell.
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Your cell phone pings the towers regularly: even if the phone is sitting still on a bedside table, it will ping the closest tower several times per day, and that goes up as you move the phone around. Every ping is a record. If you bought a phone and activated it and left it plugged in next to your bed for a year, it would generate several thousand records.
Math could be okay (Score:2)
I would be surprised if that number didn't include texts, both incoming and outgoing, as well as phone calls, both incoming and outgoing. And while it isn't described directly in TFS, there are IMs and web access, etc., which all share the "some company (your ISP, often, perhaps even usually, your 'phone company') has records of this" aspect that opens the door for t
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it looks like a lot but there is a lot of data that could be collected: ... and there will be dozens of replies, each would be separate
_ Many calls are multiple calls
_ there are failed calls
_ A lot of people will send dozens of texts
_ phones connect to the internet, maybe the actual contents go through ssl but port/ip address pairs is unencrypted, as well as data length
_ there could also be cellular network data like location, provider
Remember metadata is not data. (Score:3)
WTF does White House have to do with this? (Score:2)
help me with the math. (Score:1)
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Great News! (Score:2)
Now the police can finally track all the scammers that have been calling me!
Now if you believe that I have a bridge to sell you.
Name-dropping spin (Score:1)
While the program may have spanned multiple administrations, this summary is another example of not using the name of the politician when bad news comes out under Our Guy, and only making negative associations by name when The Other Guy is in office.
Funny how this is a White House program, but Biden isn't mentioned. Just a few years ago it would have referenced Donald Trump 6 times, even if he didn't start the program, and there's nothing showing he's even aware of it.
See also The DHS "children in cages" re
do not include recordings of any conversations? (Score:2)
While they say they don't save recordings of calls, why should we believe them? Its totally plausable, and wouldn't cost much. And I bet the government and others would have a keen interest in it. Even all those AI companies probably salivate at being able to grind through every phone conversation to teach their algorythms.
The math:
The US has ~330M people. Let's presume each person talks for an hour a day to another US person. That is way more than reality, I probably don't talk on the phone an hour a month
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Big Brother is watching! (Score:1)