Is The Government Actually Listening To Our Phone Calls & Storing Chunks Of Our Personnel Data?

a reply to: IShotMyLastMuse

Well..hopefully technological progress that enables travel across light years also comes with a little maturity.

If they're anything like us, with that kind of tech, i'd seriously hope they don't come here!

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

originally posted by: tanka418
Y'all should at least try to do the math! Storing that kind and amount of data quite simply isn't possible...yet.

How much data will a 1.5 billion dollar data center hold? It's been claimed to have a yottabyte capacity which the NSA won't confirm or deny, they say it's classified:

LOL...

That's so funny it actually hurts!

Your yottabyte is 10e24 bytes...the largest hard drive currently manufactured is 10 TB...you will need 1 trillion 10 Terabyte drives to equal that...do you really think Utah is large enough to hold that many drives? Seriously...look in your PC an see just how large you HD actually is...

I asked y'all to actually THINK about this, perhaps you should try doing the math as well, cause, you don't seem to quite understand the magnitude here...

How high is 1 trillion 0.65 inch drives stacked on top of each other? (that's over 10,000,000 miles) And after you assemble all that...just try to provide it with power and cooling! Do we need to go into the control systems for all this (the computers)? How many of y'all have any appreciation for what it would take to simply "address" all that data? ... I suppose a simple 128 bit computer would probably handle it, but...we only have 64 bit machines, and 64 bits isn't enough...

Power: 1 trillion times about 6 watts...that is 6 terawatts or about 6,000 gigawatts...there were about 4.3 million gigawatts generated in the US last year...total.

I hate to step on y'alls conspiracy theories, or call the government lairs (not really)...but, I just don't see a technological way for that amount of data to be stored...period.

And, how many hard drives do you think have been made...ever? ...

a reply to: tanka418
You're thinking in today's terms, but the Yottabyte claim was potential future capacity.

Don't think in static terms for the Yottabyte claim. If you consider this ad and project continued capacity increase and cost reduction it's completely plausible at some future date:

www.howtogeek.com...

So don't think in terms of how many 10mb hard disks it will take at $3398 each or even today's drives. Think ahead.

originally posted by: ConF7
Its been posted everywhere recently that the american government has been basically breaching our privacy since the 1930's. Listening in to our phone calls and storing huge chunks of data. Also someone informed me that there are basic holes in the internet where data is just lost, so for example you send an email whether it has attachments such as files doesn't really matter but, when you send it for some reason it does not appear in the recipients inbox, yet you've sent him the email. I was informed that these 'black holes' were put in place by the american government to gather small bits of info from everyone. When you realize how much data there is getting passed about on the internet (millions of terabytes per millisecond) it makes me wonder how much information they have stored up.

I was wondering what other peoples views were on this and if they could anything onto how big this actually is

From the internet I can tell you that the fbi started with a system called carnivore in the 90's. I am aware of only 1 isp that was fighting it to the bitter end in attempt to protect customer privacy. So nothing surprises me when this stuff is gathered

a reply to: TrueBrit

Henry the eighth and his spymaster pre-date his daughter...

originally posted by: pikestaff
a reply to: TrueBrit

Henry the eighth and his spymaster pre-date his daughter...

Even in this country you had the culper ring operating before we were established.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur
a reply to: tanka418
You're thinking in today's terms, but the Yottabyte claim was potential future capacity.

Don't think in static terms for the Yottabyte claim. If you consider this ad and project continued capacity increase and cost reduction it's completely plausible at some future date:

www.howtogeek.com...

So don't think in terms of how many 10mb hard disks it will take at $3398 each or even today's drives. Think ahead.

So...I shouldn't think in terms of "Winchester Drives" then...

Except, for now and into the foreseeable future; "Winchester" is all we got...and, all the mighty claims are for NOW...as differentiated from the future.

I have little doubt that sometime after I pass from this world there will be mass storage options that make today's 10 TB drives seem like old 8 inch floppy disks...but, that day is not today!

Today, and into the near future what we have are 10TB and smaller...what is available in 50 years doesn't concern me...

So don't think in terms of how many 10mb hard disks it will take at $3398 each or even today's drives. Think ahead.

This is just "special"...ya know; I'm an engineer who has been asked to design large mass storage solutions; so...I kind of have to think in terms like that...that's how it is done, and that is "how" a "yottabyte" storage solution will be designed...now or in the future.

originally posted by: IShotMyLastMuse
yep it's been going on for a while.
what is the exact use of it is up to anyone's guess.
for sure it's not just a matter of fighting the non existing terrorists.
america got attacked once and the government is keeping that fear alive still in 2015...finally giving russia a break i guess.
I think the amount of data being collected is inflated, collecting EVERYTHING from everyone would require equipment and costs beyond reason, especially considered the minimal output they get.
i don't think "everyone is being spied on" constantly, i imagine it more like a sort of radio scanner:
After they pick up some key words or just intel from traditional methods they place you on a monitoring list, then they set the scanner to "your" frequency and pick up all the data.
that might make it's scope smaller, but certainly not better, because we have no idea of knowing what will make them tune into your frequency.
using Tor?
buying a hazmat suit?
suggesting politicians be arrested for war crimes?

It's not so much that the spying is going on, it's that we are not allowed to know what the parameters for the search are.

It would be simple enough to collect all the web page requests made (http://... ), save a one-off copy of that page, then save all other identical requests, and their associated requesting IP address. That allows them to build up an association table of IP addresses.

originally posted by: tanka418

I have little doubt that sometime after I pass from this world there will be mass storage options that make today's 10 TB drives seem like old 8 inch floppy disks...but, that day is not today!

Today, ad into the near future what we have are 10TB and smaller...what is available in 50 years doesn't concern me...

Well then, let me welcome you to the future, and mind you this is already old tech because they are already working on larger storage capacity.

Samsung made the world's largest hard drive, with nearly 16TB of storage

This is for public use, which means the government likely has access to future generation tech already.

Well I would certainly feel sorry for the agent or agents who would be assigned to listening to and spying on me and my family.

Most boring job ever!

a reply to: pikestaff

True.

I merely used that example to show that under the reign of two monarchs with the same first name, separated by hundreds of years of history, spy craft has always played a significant role in the affairs of the day, with the main difference being how aware the majority are of what is going on in their own nation, in their own homes for that matter.

To even know that a spy was active in a household, took proximity, personal interaction, and a hell of a good gut back in the days of swordplay and corsetry. But nowadays your television, your computer, your telephone and your tablet, even your refrigerator or your toaster may have the capacity to give a stranger access to your information, everything about you. From your current and precise location, to the last thing you posted anywhere on the net, from the last thing you purchased online, to the last place you went for a beer, your whole life is viewable, and this is true whether or not you happen to be a criminal, or an innocent, a murderer or a saviour, a bigot, or a crusader for peace and love.

There is no limit, no place where we cannot be reached, no wall that can obscure a decent persons private life, from the eyes of anyone who has the tools and the know how to view it. A tool like this can be used to do great good, and only an idiot would fail to see that potential. However, given the propensity of governments to behave contrary to the wishes, and to the needs of their people, it could also be used to oppress political dissent, to alter the balance of power, to skew it even further in the favour of the powerful few, and silence the many righteous voices calling for transparency and honesty from those they elect.

It could also be used to blackmail, to destabilise communities. The sort of information that the surveillance networks have made available, is a tool which no individual, or small group thereof ever had any business wielding, because there is too much power in it. History has shown that every time a great deal of power is centred too finely, with too tight of a focus, the result is dystopian at best, and catastrophic at worst. There must be balance. Too many things known, by too few people, and too few things known by too many is a balance which does not work in the favour of the people, no matter whose people we are talking about, and no matter how many lives are allegedly saved by it, because the cost is too great, and makes a nonsense of the reason for concentrating that knowledge in the first place.

What use is keeping people free from oppression, by oppressing them? What use is giving criminals no hiding place, when treason has to be committed against the people in order to achieve it? The simple fact is, that I would rather be on fire, shot to ribbons or dismembered by rabid dogs than be surveilled without probable cause, or be forced by a lack of personal power to effect change to accept that my autistic son will grow up in a future warned of by Orwell, and that nothing can be done to prevent it. And yet that is the exact situation in which we find ourselves.

Make no mistake, we are being watched, and because it has been allowed to go on so long, without any effective resistance to it, I fear that we are doomed to a predictable outcome, one which does not bode well for the majority of citizens of the allegedly free world. While this system remains in place, while eyes are at all our backs in all that we do, we are not free. We are not even free range. We are captives in our homes, and in our homelands, prisoners in a facility with no walls, and where every home is just another cell block, every resident another number.

TrueBrit: This is one of the best posts I have ever read on this site. It is amazing to me that so few people actually realize the implications of the total information awareness approach to surveillance today. We are heading a direction that seems inescapable at the moment.

a reply to: tanka418

How do you know whats possible considering you have no real idea as to there storage capability? How do you know they dont have the capability to store Yottabytes. They might have server farms totaling the size of the states of Delaware and Rhode Island for all you know. Or maybe "they" have perfected memristors and solved there data storage problems to a degree we are not aware of?

originally posted by: andy06shake
a reply to: tanka418

How do you know whats possible considering you have no real idea as to there storage capability? How do you know they dont have the capability to store Yottabytes. They might have server farms totaling the size of the states of Delaware and Rhode Island for all you know. Or maybe "they" have perfected memristors and solved there data storage problems to a degree we are not aware of?

Actually, I'm a semi-retired computer hardware / software engineer. ..it is kind of important that I keep up to date with such things. As I said, recently I was Required to do the architecture for a large data storage / warehouse system. .. so, this is something that I have researched recently.

I know there are no Yottabyte systems because, they haven't made that many hard drives yet.

originally posted by: tanka418

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

originally posted by: tanka418
Y'all should at least try to do the math! Storing that kind and amount of data quite simply isn't possible...yet.

How much data will a 1.5 billion dollar data center hold? It's been claimed to have a yottabyte capacity which the NSA won't confirm or deny, they say it's classified:

LOL...

That's so funny it actually hurts!

Your yottabyte is 10e24 bytes...the largest hard drive currently manufactured is 10 TB...you will need 1 trillion 10 Terabyte drives to equal that...do you really think Utah is large enough to hold that many drives? Seriously...look in your PC an see just how large you HD actually is...

I asked y'all to actually THINK about this, perhaps you should try doing the math as well, cause, you don't seem to quite understand the magnitude here...

How high is 1 trillion 0.65 inch drives stacked on top of each other? (that's over 10,000,000 miles) And after you assemble all that...just try to provide it with power and cooling! Do we need to go into the control systems for all this (the computers)? How many of y'all have any appreciation for what it would take to simply "address" all that data? ... I suppose a simple 128 bit computer would probably handle it, but...we only have 64 bit machines, and 64 bits isn't enough...

Power: 1 trillion times about 6 watts...that is 6 terawatts or about 6,000 gigawatts...there were about 4.3 million gigawatts generated in the US last year...total.

I hate to step on y'alls conspiracy theories, or call the government lairs (not really)...but, I just don't see a technological way for that amount of data to be stored...period.

And, how many hard drives do you think have been made...ever? ...

You have to think though the american government, although they don't show it to the public, are atleast 70/90 years above people in technology maybe they found a compressor. Yes i do understand the size, Being a computer engineer myself but, i think they will have found a way to sort, save and file that much data probably in a matter of seconds as well

The police (local and state) are now getting "Stingray" or "Kingfisher" devices to intercept cell phone calls (and even record them).

It’s a box-shaped portable device, sometimes described as an “IMSI catcher,” that gathers information from phones by sending out a signal that tricks them into connecting to it. The Stingray can be covertly set up virtually anywhere—in the back of a vehicle, for instance—and can be used over a targeted radius to collect hundreds of unique phone identifying codes, such as the International Mobile Subscriber Number (IMSI) and the Electronic Serial Number (ESM). The authorities can then hone in on specific phones of interest to monitor the location of the user in real time or use the spy tool to log a record of all phones in a targeted area at a particular time.

The FBI uses the Stingray to track suspects and says that it does not use the tool to intercept the content of communications. However, this capability does exist. Procurement documents indicate that the Stingray can also be used with software called “FishHawk,” (PDF) which boosts the device’s capabilities by allowing authorities to eavesdrop on conversations.

Arstechnica

And, based on the new information about the US drone program, cell phone SIM cards are being used to home in on targets. It wouldn't surprise me if our drones have Stingrays/IMSI technology on them to enable the suspects cell phone from becoming a homing beacon.

The problem with these devices is that it "slurps" up large swaths of information. Innocent people who happen to be nearby have their phone connect to the device, giving the authorities information about the phone's owner.

In my state, this violates our state's constitution -- we have a "right to privacy" clause in addition to the standard constitutional guarantees:

Article one, section 22 of the Alaska Constitution:

22. Right of Privacy The right of the people to privacy is recognized and shall not be infringed. The legislature shall implement this section.

I happen to know my city has the "Kingfisher" varient (it's basically the same thing). I read the minutes from the city coucil meeting where the police chief was approved the funds for them. He didn't even explain the technology to the assembly. Instead he just basically said, "We need these gizmos, they'll make it easier for us to do our job. Here's how much we need. Thanks!" *sigh*

So yes, the government is and can tap your cell phone and you won't ever know. Your cell phone will connect to one of these devices thinking it is a cell tower. They're small enough to fit into the trunk of a car, and are now sophisticated enough to record phone calls during a traffic stop.

a reply to: tanka418

I seem to remember holographic hard drives being "only years away!" -- then suddenly they disappeared. Word has it that the patents got taken by the DoD and the entire technology behind them went black.

There very well could be hard drive technology capable of immense storage that the average consumer has no idea about, being worked on and developed in secret.

originally posted by: TrueBrit
a reply to: pikestaff

True.

I merely used that example to show that under the reign of two monarchs with the same first name, separated by hundreds of years of history, spy craft has always played a significant role in the affairs of the day, with the main difference being how aware the majority are of what is going on in their own nation, in their own homes for that matter.

To even know that a spy was active in a household, took proximity, personal interaction, and a hell of a good gut back in the days of swordplay and corsetry. But nowadays your television, your computer, your telephone and your tablet, even your refrigerator or your toaster may have the capacity to give a stranger access to your information, everything about you. From your current and precise location, to the last thing you posted anywhere on the net, from the last thing you purchased online, to the last place you went for a beer, your whole life is viewable, and this is true whether or not you happen to be a criminal, or an innocent, a murderer or a saviour, a bigot, or a crusader for peace and love.

There is no limit, no place where we cannot be reached, no wall that can obscure a decent persons private life, from the eyes of anyone who has the tools and the know how to view it. A tool like this can be used to do great good, and only an idiot would fail to see that potential. However, given the propensity of governments to behave contrary to the wishes, and to the needs of their people, it could also be used to oppress political dissent, to alter the balance of power, to skew it even further in the favour of the powerful few, and silence the many righteous voices calling for transparency and honesty from those they elect.

It could also be used to blackmail, to destabilise communities. The sort of information that the surveillance networks have made available, is a tool which no individual, or small group thereof ever had any business wielding, because there is too much power in it. History has shown that every time a great deal of power is centred too finely, with too tight of a focus, the result is dystopian at best, and catastrophic at worst. There must be balance. Too many things known, by too few people, and too few things known by too many is a balance which does not work in the favour of the people, no matter whose people we are talking about, and no matter how many lives are allegedly saved by it, because the cost is too great, and makes a nonsense of the reason for concentrating that knowledge in the first place.

What use is keeping people free from oppression, by oppressing them? What use is giving criminals no hiding place, when treason has to be committed against the people in order to achieve it? The simple fact is, that I would rather be on fire, shot to ribbons or dismembered by rabid dogs than be surveilled without probable cause, or be forced by a lack of personal power to effect change to accept that my autistic son will grow up in a future warned of by Orwell, and that nothing can be done to prevent it. And yet that is the exact situation in which we find ourselves.

Make no mistake, we are being watched, and because it has been allowed to go on so long, without any effective resistance to it, I fear that we are doomed to a predictable outcome, one which does not bode well for the majority of citizens of the allegedly free world. While this system remains in place, while eyes are at all our backs in all that we do, we are not free. We are not even free range. We are captives in our homes, and in our homelands, prisoners in a facility with no walls, and where every home is just another cell block, every resident another number.

Thanks for the contribution and information to the thread buddy, appreciate it

a reply to: tanka418

Fair point but how can you research government data storage capability's or even commercial data storage that they dont want you to know about?

And being a semi-retired computer hardware/software engineer im sure you are aware as to the potential storage capabilities never mind various other applications the fabled memristor would usher in to being, allegedly up to 100s of terabytes of high-speed RAM, possibly even 1000s of terabytes. I understand that 1 yottabyte = 1000000000000 terabytes but i also remember when my biggest hard drive was only 7Mb. Its called progress for good or for bad, its happening.