NSA collecting Verizon customers' data

[cofi]

they have been collecting everything for years now

http://neoformix.com/2009/Sep11PagerData.html

[RblDiver]

I get the urge to go make a ton of crank calls to terrorists right now.

"Excuse me, is your refrigerator running?" "We don't have one in this tiny cave!" "Oh...never mind then."

[Uberjager]

I, for one, welcome our new totalitarian overlords.

[rockhound]

Sucking up are we

[roberth]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-0...e-records-2001

On May 11, 2006, USA Today published an article reporting that AT&T, Verizon, and Bellsouth had been providing the NSA with the telephone records of “tens of millions of Americans” since shortly after September 11, 2001. Called “the largest database ever assembled in the world” by the newspaper’s source, its purported goal was to “‘create a database of every call ever made’ within the nation’s borders.”

[sellersm]

Who needs NSA facilities? They just put "rooms" directly into the backbone fiber: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-0...rets-room-641a

Here's a snippet from the article:

Room 641A is located in the SBC Communications building at 611 Folsom Street, San Francisco, three floors of which were occupied by AT&T before SBC purchased AT&T. The room was referred to in internal AT&T documents as the SG3 [Study Group 3] Secure Room. It is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic and, as analyzed by J. Scott Marcus, a former CTO for GTE and a former adviser to the FCC, has access to all Internet traffic that passes through the building, and therefore "the capability to enable surveillance and analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and purely domestic traffic." Former director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, William Binney, has estimated that 10 to 20 such facilities have been installed throughout the nation.
The room measures about 24 by 48 feet (7.3 by 15 m) and contains several racks of equipment, including a Narus STA 6400, a device designed to intercept and analyze Internet communications at very high speeds.

The very existence of the room was revealed by a former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, and was the subject of a 2006 class action lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T.[5] Klein claims he was told that similar black rooms are operated at other facilities around the country.

Room 641A and the controversies surrounding it were subjects of an episode of Frontline, the current affairs documentary program on PBS. It was originally broadcast on May 15, 2007. It was also featured on PBS's NOW on March 14, 2008. The room was also covered in the PBS NOVA episode "The Spy Factory".

There is so much more to this, this is just the tip of the iceberg. As fitting for an episode from Atlas Shrugged, there are corporations that are "getting their way" with lobbying the .g0v agencies, which is leading to these kinds of warrants, court orders, breaches, etc. It's mind-boggling and incredibly sad at the same time.

[Dave]

Yay Patriot Act?

[asmo]

Someone tell me how this is about AR-15s?

[sellersm]

Someone tell me how this is about AR-15s?

It's about that phone call you made a while ago, and electronic discussion, about that new AR you acquired without a bgc in a private, fully legal, FTF sale!

It's my opinion that this has NOTHING to do with the Patriot Act, public safety or anything else, but instead about protecting certain corporations' assets and interests (no, not the telecoms), and promoting the new 'war on cyber terrorism' (which will then lead to more legislation that erodes freedoms and shreds what's left of our founding documents).

[Ronin13]

Someone tell me how this is about AR-15s?

In the immortal words of David Spade: "Hi, I'm Earth, have we met?"