Government snooping, part one
As you may have read, the U.K.’s The Guardian newspaper broke a story about how Verizon is releasing vast amounts of information to our government. They are delivering detail of its customer’s movements, numbers dialed or received, call length, GPS coordinates and almost everything about your call patterns, locations and so on. You can watch a NBC report below.
Your elected representatives are not concerned about this collection of data on “the little people” as Leona Helmsley once said (that’s you) as long as the administration doesn’t collect this information on them. Go to minute two in the NBC video below for that part of the report.
If you forward to minute three shows an exchange between the director of the NSA, General James Clapper, and Senator Ron Wyden (D) who specifically asked if this information was collected, Mr. Clapper said “No.” I wonder if General Clapper will be prosecuted for lying to a Senate investigatory panel? If he clearly lied under oath will he go to jail, be fined, lose his pensions and be disgraced. Or will he get away with it, so other people will know that lying to Congress doesn’t matter. What do you think?
The only part missing from the government’s Verizon request is to gain the ability to record every phone conversation and text message. As I’ve written before, it’s believed that every call is being recorded, but not listened to pending a specific wiretap order so they can listen to your every call made for years in the past. It’s a legal dodge.
Our government may only claim to access foreign telephone calls but that’s a canard. Here’s why… it’s ridiculously easy to establish a Voice over IP (VoIP) Internet U.S. phone number from anywhere in the world. Commercial businesses such as RingCentral sells U.S. and other phone numbers for a few dollars a month. They can be paid for using a U.S. PayPal or other account that a foreign person can set up using a pre-paid credit card. It can have almost any area code desired. You can even spoof a VoIP caller ID to show any phone number you want to be seen, even (202) 456-1111, the White House!
The U.S. based VoIP phone server can be connected from overseas using an encrypted circuit that registers the telephone or PC based telephone software. I’d also suggest that no one will be able to find the real origination point if the person uses a TOR connection (thanks to DARPA) to make the connection. Those phone calls “originate” in the U.S., even though they can be actually from anywhere. That’s why domestic calls are being recorded. All of them.
The Internet is the great equalizer, the equivalent of the Colt .45. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Even worse, it’s believed that the NSA can remotely turn on cell phone cameras and microphones (thanks to the cell phone companies assistance) without the owner’s consent or awareness. Everything will be recorded. Even the East German secret police, the hated and feared Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS) could only install microphones in peoples’ homes. If true, the NSA can see and hear everything, everywhere. What’s next?
Another legal dodge is when President Obama, a lawyer said ‘‘Nobody is listening to your telephone calls’’ he is probably telling the truth. Nobody listens to your telephone calls, but machines are. They aren’t people, and as a lawyer uses words very carefully he can deceive the public with ease.
As terrorists have the sense to encrypt communications, or should have, be they email or text messages and probably record encrypted mp3 attachments, all using complex very strong encryption methods, it won’t make much if any difference to them. Just to you. The American public doesn’t try to hide anything, so its content will be looked at, carefully. Terrorist traffic will be impossible to decrypt unless they use a weak cipher.
In fact, my company looks at federal government R.F.P.s for equipment used to collect massive amounts of information. It can be accessed and allows automatic transcriptions at lightning speed. They are known as SANs. These are specialized server farms, where the equipment does little but store massive amounts of raw information, that’s accessible in an instant. It’s accessed by government super servers anywhere, to work instantaneously with all of the collected data.
Our government is known to have transported prisoners to third-party countries, Libya, Egypt and others for intense interrogation so it can claim that it hasn’t tortured suspects. That’s technically correct; we have the other countries do it for us.
Continued in part two.
