Intel Official: Say Goodbye to Privacy

http://apnews.myway.com/article/20071111/D8SRJ1DO0.html</p>

<span id="article"><span id="intelliTXT"><font size="2" face="Verdana,Sans-serif" color="#000000">Intel Official: Say Goodbye to Privacy</font></span></span></p>

<span id="article"><span id="intelliTXT"><font face="Verdana,Sans-serif"><font size="1"><span class="L8"><span class="oldL8">Nov 11, 11:39 AM (ET)

</span></span></font><font size="2">By PAMELA HESS</font></font></span></span></p>

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WASHINGTON (AP) - A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.</p>

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information.</p>

Kerr's comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act.</p>

Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.</p>

The original law required a court order for any surveillance conducted on U.S. soil, to protect Americans' privacy. The White House argued that the law was obstructing intelligence gathering.</p>

The most contentious issue in the new legislation is whether to shield telecommunications companies from civil lawsuits for allegedly giving the government access to people's private e-mails and phone calls without a court order between 2001 and 2007.</p>

Some lawmakers, including members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, appear reluctant to grant immunity. Suits might be the only way to determine how far the government has burrowed into people's privacy without court permission.</p>

The committee is expected to decide this week whether its version of the bill will protect telecommunications companies.</p>

The central witness in a California lawsuit against AT&T says the government is vacuuming up billions of e-mails and phone calls as they pass through an AT&T switching station in San Francisco.</p>

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines.</p>

(This version CORRECTS Kerr's title to 'the principal deputy director' instead of 'a deputy director.')</p>
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Let me get out my calculator. First a few assumptions. Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T have at least 50M cell phone subscribers - factor in the rest of the carriers and there's well over 150M. Assume each phone is used for 100 minutes/month. Digitized speech suitable for telephone transmission is 8K bytes per second.</p>

150M subscribers * 100 minutes/month * 8K bytes/sec * 60 sec/minute * 60 minute/hour * 24 hours/day * 31 days/month</p>

Let's see how much hard disk is required to store just one month's worth.</p>

321,408,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of disk space required.</p>

That's 321.408 Million terrabytes. Do you realize how much space 321.4 million 1 terrabyte disk drives would take up? PER MONTH, too.</p>

LOL at the super computer concept. I seriously doubt they have 150M people with 100 hours per month to listen to all those calls, too. Plus, I'm underestimating the number of minutes and phones, no doubt.</p>

What they logically can do is monitor a destination phone number and record those calls. Which is exactly what the FISA court is set up to permit.</p>

The real risk is they abuse the authority to spy on people suspected of dealing drugs or some other domestic crimes. I have not seen a single accusation that this administration is doing this kind of thing, but the risk is there for Hillary (or other administrations down the road).</p>

E-Mails is another story. Parsing text and junking emails that don't have certain keywords (like bomb or terrorist or something like that) is rather easy and you don't need to keep any but the ones that matter.</p>

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Problem is you want to listen to the whole call, once you detect the keywords.</p>

Even if that is what they were doing, it's hardly the privacy scare people are making it out to be. No human is listening to the calls unless there's a red flag, which would likely be very few of the calls at all.</p>

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They're looking at traffic patterns in a broad way and correlating those patterns with other databases (books checked out of libraries, visa card purchases, whatever). This helps them identify suspicious phone numbers to tap. Normally, you get a court order and tap a phone, knowing that it's going to be used very soon for some illegal purpose. In the case of terrorists, they found a laptop on the battlefield with phone numbers on the hard drive, and they have no idea when or if those numbers will receive a call. So they need some sort of ongoing kind of wire tap, and that's not provided for in any laws until very recently (Democrats passed a law authorizing these kinds of wire taps, see the article above, too)</p>

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