[IP] Did NSA phone call surveillance include local call records?
Begin forwarded message:
From: Richard Wiggins <richard.wiggins@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: May 11, 2006 11:18:01 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Did NSA phone call surveillance include local call records?
Dave,
News reports say that millions of domestic phone call records,
showing presumably the numbers calling and called, were harvested by
the NSA.
Did this include local -- non-long distance, non-metered -- phone
calls? Did it include calls within a local switch?
Traditional phone companies keep records of long distance calls for
billing purposes, as do cell providers. But there is no reason for a
phone company to keep records of purely local phone calls, especially
those initiated and completed within a local switch.
If phone companies are capturing detailed records of local landline
phone calls, we have a much bigger story than reported so far. Since
most if not all central offices now have digital switches, it'd be
easy to capture local calling records.
But why?
/rich
From the NYT:
The USA Today article on Thursday went further, saying that the
N.S.A. had created an enormous database of all calls made by
customers of the three phone companies in an effort to compile a log
of "every call ever made" within this country. The report said one
large phone company, Qwest, had refused to cooperate with the N.S.A.
because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over
customer information to the government without warrants.
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