[IP] more on Did NSA phone call surveillance include local call records?
Begin forwarded message:
From: Simon Higgs <simon@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: May 12, 2006 2:00:54 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx, Richard Wiggins <richard.wiggins@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] Did NSA phone call surveillance include local call
records?
Dave,
All calls have to be accounted for and even the free ones are metered
@ $0.00. It's one part of the phone company's planning and
forecasting requirements. Local law enforcement uses local phone
records frequently (ask any crime analyst). The conversations are not
monitored, but the calling patterns will frequently identify who is
giving out instructions and who is performing tasks. The California
DoJ Crime and Intelligence Analysts Certificate specifies the
following: "Use telephone toll analysis to plot telephone activity to
determine the size and location of criminal groups and individuals
involved."
In this particular case, the NSA is just a giant aggregator,
vacuuming up existing data from thousands of local switches via the
parent phone companies. The NSA compiles data from any sources it has
access to under the "better to ask forgiveness than ask permission"
doctrine. This is exactly what any prudent intelligence gatherer
does. The common problem is that, along the way, it acquires
"permission" from sources that "voluntarily" hand over data that
stretch legal precedents (some are outright illegal). This problem
goes all the way back to the Black Chamber illegally processing
Western Union telegrams as long ago as 1919.
Simon
At 02:05 AM 5/12/2006, David Farber wrote:
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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Best Regards,
Simon Higgs
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