NSA sought data on 534 MILLION phone calls in 2017

Ain't technology wonderful ?

"The report says America’s national security agencies sought 534,396,285 call detail records in calendar 2017"

Seems to me they're drowning themselves in data. It is just not possible that their search criteria is sufficiently precise to yield actionable data.

Good.They'll be spending valuable tax dollars searching for eff all, while actual innocent people will suffer no consequences.

Hey, if you can't beat 'em, you can drown 'em in irrelevant data.

New MAGA freedom search criteria as from next year

SELECT * FROM call_records WHERE 1=1;

That they admitted to.

I just assume all call data is archived, made available, and used. With the NSA a more or less completely opaque organization this is the only reasonable assumption.

You'll notice that I'm not panicking. But to think otherwise would be naive.

22,360 v's 31,196 search terms.

Kill,murder,death,bomb,stab,shoot and tickle.

What else can there be and why the increase in terms?

Dear Americans,

You have a constitution for a reason, use it and stop this bullshit.

Regards,

Concerned Briton.

P.S. Can you look after your chickens properly after brexit please?

Hypothetically:

1. Find all the calls in city A on date d1. (Millions)

2. Find all the calls in city B on date d2. (Millions)

3. Intersect on mobile number, to reveal the one/ten/hundred people who colud have been involved in the event in A on d1 AND the event in B on d2.

If the published numbers are recording the millions in lines 1 and 2, this doesn’t look to crazy.

And they prpbably are storing that data because when the event in city C on date d3 comes along, you don’t want to find that the d1 data has been lost.

Hmmm

Canada, population 37M. Large carrier.

CDR input volume, one city, one day, one carrier, and only one of 8 lines of business. > 1.5B cdr's -- once one starts to include motion and notational CDRs in LTE and VOIP QI CDRs.

CDRs are no longer *solely* "call connected between unit a and unit b" - what gets collected goes *way way* beyond that now.

Considering the US is 330+ Million folks, 8 or 9 carrier/LOB and a dozen or so MVNO's, and I think a per capita of 3 phones per body, those numbers *really* aren't that big.

OK, so I'm a child

But I just thought it was appropriate that they hit on 1337 targets as an estimate.

How elite h4xx0r is that?

Complete lack of understanding of the situation

At any given moment there are thousands of criminals and terrorists under surveillance. Digital crime has skyrocketed because the crims are technically years ahead of OS makers, software purveyors and authorities who are out numbered 10,000 to 1 by the crims. With computers sorting data only the most blatant is captured for review by humans. Thus the crims have little to be concerned about, especially Snowden who is doomed to live a shortened life for being a traitor to the U.S. and an indirect supporter of crime.

The CTIA (1) shows a graph indicating 396 million connections, which seems in the context to be wireless telephones. A Pew study from 2010 (2) reports an estimate of about 5 calls per day for each cell phone. On the assumption that a number did not decrease significantly over the next 7 years it seems likely that the NSA collection reported amounts to well under a tenth of a percent of all US cell calls for the year, and a smaller fraction of all US telephone calls. That would have been a bit under 2 billion calls daily, and I have seen an estimate of 6 billion daily, although without references.

The numbers are large, but as a proportion of the total they certainly do not indicate serious mass surveillance of US persons. Although it is somewhat a matter of taste, it is not clear they even qualify as "quite extensive." Numbers of US targets are similarly unsupportive of mass surveillance, as is the information about probable cause orders, targets, and search terms.

The report is interesting, though, and good on The Register for linking it. Too few reports on such things do that. Indeed, a quick search suggests the Washington Post and New York Times considered the report too inconsequential to mention. In fact The Register seems to have the first non-government article (known to Google) on the 2017 report .

(1) At https://www.ctia.org/the-wireless-industry/infographics-library,

(2) At http://www.pewinternet.org/2010/09/02/cell-phones-and-american-adults/

If datamining (learning, testing, applying) then they need “background” (norms) as well as “foreground” (baddies).

“Miiisster Griiimmmsdale!!!”

Excuses -- Unexcusable

Whatever the current technical limitation preventing de-dupping, there must be a way to fix it so that excuses are impossible, and they must be required to fix it.

They can't be allowed to have technology if it has limitations that allow them to make excusses. They must be required to fix the technology so that there are no excuses--whether it be de-dupping issues or otherwise.