Do You Have a Secret?

[no1_vern]

Help understanding:

Whistleblower, Suspected of Leaking Warrantless Spying Program, Sues NSA | Threat Level | Wired.com

[sharder8]

Help understanding:

Whistleblower, Suspected of Leaking Warrantless Spying Program, Sues NSA | Threat Level | Wired.com

While part of that program is no longer in use, parts of it are. This program has been superseded, updated, and improved upon, as technology has improved.


Harder

[sharder8]

No actually I do know about this. i know the signal paths and routing of calls in my switch. I know what comes in and out of my switch.

Please do tell how the 10 million calls a day get out of my switch to the NSA with out wires? You may not know as much as you think you know.

The claim is that every one of the hundreds of millions of calls generated on land line and Cellular are ported off to a government computer and decoded is a conspiracy theorists wet dream but patently false. I have already explained that a tremendous number of them right off the bat do not get decoded because they are point to point. If I found it necessary to send all the mobile to mobile calls out our switch I would need tremendous resources that would not go un-noticed.

Currently the only mobile to mobile calls we sent out are to a fixed set of trunks based upon legal TAP requests.

I don't know what you think you know about the subject. I am quite sure that a government computer could decode most if not all dialects, languages cadences and all if not most mixtures of the above. They may even be able to do a suprisingly large quantity of them. But you really need to push the I believe button when you claim that they could process every voice conversation on a daily basis. Even if the hooks were in place to port the information to them. According to one source there are 2.4 billion voice calls daily. i will stick with my customers statistics of an average call duration of 110 call seconds. Assuming that everyone uses 8KBs vocoders that works out to be at least 2,100 terrabytes daily (not including any TCPIP overhead just data) if every call is as efficient as my system. 264 billion call seconds daily would need to be decoded.

I still contend that all monitoring is either done as random sampling and or targeted people. There is no program out there that will send the secret service to my house if I say I that I have a nuke in my pocket.

I could say that on the phone and detail my plans and no one would ever show up because there is no one listening. Because it is likely impossible to listen to all conversations and because I know for a fact that we do not send said information out of our switch except for specific targeted lines.

You don't have a clue Epi . . . you can believe me or not. BTW, they don't need to "tap" into your line or network. There are other ways of siphoning off the voice and data.

Something most people don't know, is the entire phone system in the Puget Sound, is actually under the control of 1 company . . . and it isn't a telecom. (Telecoms lease the infrastructure for public use.)


Harder

[brandon184]

Actually I know were every wire is going.

You've seen every last inch of cable throughout the entire network of cell sites? Gotcha.

You are right though, I don't know what magic signal processing resources the government has but I am gonna stick with my gut feeling that no one on earth currently has a voice decoder capable of decoding every voice conversation, dialect, speaking impedament, frequency, cadence and accent. Any eaves dropping the government does on voice I am gonna continue to believe is a much smaller subset than all people who make voice calls.

Another assumption of yours is that the monitoring could only possibly be occurring if 100% accuracy is achieved. I'm sure the government would jump at the opportunity even if it was only possible for their software to "decode" 60% of calls. From an intelligence perspective, do you really think they'd rather have 0% than 60%?

[Taxmancometh]

Everybody has a secret. Even Jesus didn't tell his disciples that he was God.

I thought Jesus was the son of God.

[Epidemic]

You don't have a clue Epi . . . you can believe me or not. BTW, they don't need to "tap" into your line or network. There are other ways of siphoning off the voice and data.

Something most people don't know, is the entire phone system in the Puget Sound, is actually under the control of 1 company . . . and it isn't a telecom. (Telecoms lease the infrastructure for public use.)


Harder

Ok tell me how they siphon off gigabytes of calls off my t1's with out wires. Have they put a radio transmitter in my switch? As a call is placed and sent over a narrow beam microwave to my switch and switched to different cell and microwave link ultimately delivered to another handset. Where did they tap into.

And I guess you might conclude they could read it off the air... that would be a fairly difficult to accomplish in mass. Calls are constantly changing channels and moving codes and adjusting power that to minimal power. The long key is 10^42 contains shares secret data not transmitted. Several years ago MIT scientists. Were able to hack a CDMA after several months of processing. I do believe they have achieved real time decoding but you would have to follow the mobile to listen to a conversation. I guess they could have agents following everyone?

I don't question your having seen amazing tech but they are not monitoring every call.

[sharder8]

I don't question your having seen amazing tech but they are not monitoring every call.

They don't have to monitor every call. They are listening for specific words and phrases. When those are detected, then they listen.

Like I said Epi, you're out of your league and don't have a clue.


Harder

[Taxmancometh]

They don't have to monitor every call. They are listening for specific words and phrases. When those are detected, then they listen.

Like I said Epi, you're out of your league and don't have a clue.


Harder

[Epidemic]

They don't have to monitor every call. They are listening for specific words and phrases. When those are detected, then they listen.

Like I said Epi, you're out of your league and don't have a clue.


Harder

that is all I am arguing, try reading with out bias. I have only been arguing that every conversation is not monitored. It is impossible from a practical POV at this point in time. Now if you want to say they are scanning all Long distance, calls word for the words president and bomb, that is a heluva lot more possible and dare I say likely.

However, my switch does not have a wire in it sent to the us government, making many calls for all practical purposes off limits. I am willing to bet that virtually every cell phone company is the same in this regard.


The claim that all calls are monitored is a joke and preposterous. If you want to claim (reasonably) that more certain routes are monitored 100% scanned for a key list of 100 words and phrases. Now that is very reasonable. The AT&T/NSA whistle blower for area 641 was a long distance route, a nice central listening post and very reasonbly exists. My calls from my company may well be routed there when I go over the AT&T lines.

What happens after a call leaves my network I don't know what happens to it beyond a conceptional knowledge.




PS as for scanning voice streams for words, although the processing power is much less un-believable it still would require the whole stream be ported to the machine for processing. If I were to be supplying info whosale to the government it would still not go un-noticed due to the fact I could not afford the facilities it would require.

Unless I was filtering it first and packaging it for the government. I am not! The fellar in charge of our switch is not a high paid MIB type. the guy in charge of our purchasing of facilities and engineering our capacity is kinda a nut dare I say a conspiracy nut. He would spill the beans


Brandon,

Yes I have seen every inch of my switch, touched every pack and vocoder. I have looked at every patch pannel. The patch pannel room (where we connect to the world) is only 15 by 15 room and the switch that makes the magic happen is in a 20 X 40 room. then we have a fire suppression room and a power/battery room 1 office and a war room.

[Epidemic]

there is a problem monitoring all internet Traffic. much of the traffic happens within network clusters. AT&T may be playing ball but they are but one player.

I am not saying the government should do this, But there is no one stop shop for the government to listen in on conversations Email or otherwise. The Service provider has to play ball and I can say for us we have either not played ball or have not been asked.

[tony_j15]

I think I'm going to side with Epi here. I'll take the word of the guy who messes with the wires every day.
But that actually brings us back around to Room 641, which monitored long-distance/international traffic.

[Epidemic]

Even the whistle blower at AT&T stated that 641A was digital internet traffic (maybe voice in the form of voip)

[brandon184]

I am not saying the government should do this, But there is no one stop shop for the government to listen in on conversations Email or otherwise. The Service provider has to play ball and I can say for us we have either not played ball or have not been asked.

I'd believe that you haven't been asked. But I also believe that these activities are performed in an extremely clandestine manner. Do you think that when they set up Room 641A at AT&T that they sent out a company-wide memo letting everyone know? I'd bet the folks working on the 7th floor of that building every day have no idea what is really going on with all of the data being siphoned off to the 6th floor. And I'd bet they aren't allowed to talk about it, either.

That's the problem that many people have with some of this stuff. There's little transparency and the gov't doesn't care whether or not you are wiling to participate. If the gov't wants to read up on John Doe's Gmail account, Google provides access and their lips are sealed from telling Mr. Doe that the gov't is reading his e-mail!

Epi, what happens if the FBI comes and wants to listen in on one of your cell customer's calls?

[Epidemic]

I sit next to the custodian of records, before we surrender even the time and date of calls we have subpoena or court order .

If we have a request for a tap we do so by court order we connect a line to a law enforcement box where they have access to it. it is very tightly controlled and only has a few taps at any given time. Said box has very little bandwidth coming in to it and very little out. You are not gonna send all our calls out through the box even if CSI Abby, Jack Bower and Gus Gorman all teamed up to hack us.

As for the secret room. There is no place for it I described the facility above. There are no secret law enforcement boxes with padlocks on them, no inaccessable doors with NSA only access.

Dude give it up we do not provide anything beyond what is requested by the court.

We receive two types of historical requests and one type we wont even generate the cell site the customer was served off of. just start time, end time, Duration and mobile number that placed the call. Although I have no idea what they do with that request. I have helped our custodian of records on many occasions meet Law Enforcement demands.

I personally know the guy (only one guy who sets up CALEA requests) He makes under 70,000 dollars per year and is far from a government spook.

you have to understand the scale of my company, I know every person involve in the process of creating, a cell phone call. I can tell you tidbits about their families.

There is no magic box in my switch that is sending calls out. Sorry to burst your bubble but your conspiracy information is wrong.

[brandon184]

As for the secret room.

Who said anything about a secret room? Again, your assumptions are getting the better of you. They wouldn't have an entire secret room set up a small operation like yours! Like you said, the place is small enough where you know everyone's families.

[quote=Epidemic]Dude give it up we do not provide anything beyond what is requested by the court./QUOTE]

I have no insider knowledge, I'm just suggesting. Though you better watch out for Harder, as you've basically called him a retard in this thread in a roundabout way by implying that he has no idea what he's talking about.

[Epidemic]

[QUOTE=brandon184;3354940]Who said anything about a secret room? Again, your assumptions are getting the better of you. They wouldn't have an entire secret room set up a small operation like yours! Like you said, the place is small enough where you know everyone's families.

Dude give it up we do not provide anything beyond what is requested by the court./QUOTE]

I have no insider knowledge, I'm just suggesting. Though you better watch out for Harder, as you've basically called him a retard in this thread in a roundabout way by implying that he has no idea what he's talking about.

Harder may have seen some cool stuff, he may even know of many calls that are handled by the government throught the assistance of LD providers and super computers.

I am just saying I know what is happening in my organization pretty dang well and there is little room for any snooping to go on. Since 1987 when I started in the industry I have seen no indication of any one I know having been involved in such snooping. My circle of friends includes some pretty hard core anti government types who would spill the beans in a second working for verizon, sprint, and At&T all involved in groups that would be required to make changes to allow such whosale snooping. They are mostly in regional offices since there is no super centralized switch than handles all of verizons calls nor sprint calls. Although I have to admit my information about sprint verizon and at&t is much less indepth then my company.