Dictatorship, Part 2

[filkertom]

(You may notice no option to reply to a thread. Apparently LJ is cocking up. Follow the direct link to the thread, and you can comment just fine.)

The Chicago Tribune thought enough about this story to get tomorrow's editorial on the web today (free registration may be required).

Comments

[darthparadox.livejournal.com]

(Glad LJ's not just screwing up for me. Means I didn't screw anything up.)

Fantastic. Some of the larger media outlets are realizing the depths to which this administration is willing to sink while paying lip service to the idea of "national security". There's at least one very clear reason why the media should care deeply about this issue, and it's even self-serving enough that it might work for them - that kind of access into phone records can result in teh ability to track journalists' sources, and even use that information to, for example, pre-emptively censor (or even arrest) journalists under the sort of sedition laws that I'm sure aren't too far down the agenda for the neocon administration. Of course, those sorts of worries wouldn't concern the vast portion of the media which exists as a mouthpiece for the administration in the first place. They're already good little lackeys; they have nothing to fear but falling out of favor with the royal court.

How long until the revolution?

[youngcurmudgeon.livejournal.com]

And that's the Trib, which is notoriously Republican. Daaaaaaaaaaamn. ~snaps~

Thanks for the heads-up.

[salkryn.livejournal.com]

Huh, it works now. Coolbeans.

[dragonscholar.livejournal.com]

I've been following this via www.memeorandum.com. This thing has legs, I hope the outrage is maintained.

What does disgust me is seeing the defenses of this by some of the wingnuts. Companies hand over your data to the government for vast data mining and these bedwetters are FOR it.

[ericthemage.livejournal.com]

Having worked in telecommunications, and dealing with databases in excess of 100 million call records over a 45 day period, I can say that while this is disturbing, it's also a huge waste of time and effort. Why? Because that's a metric shitload of data. It took me a while just to extract call records for one specific phone number from a specific period of time. I worked at LDMI (which was purchased by TalkAmerica) for 7 years, and we had customers numbering in the tens of thousands, and only covered Michigan and parts of a few other states. In order to track all phone conversations, they'd need access to all customers that had that specific phone number at that specific time. I expect a lot of screw ups. Old lady Smith had that phone number just before a "terrorist" had it, and all of a sudden she's being followed by the FBI because the phone company who handled the number didn't keep good records as to when their customers owned the number.

When you throw in all phone companies across the US, and how notoriously bad their record keeping is, you can see that the biggest threat is all of the mistakes that they'll make. One company that was purchased by LDMI had such horrific record keeping that they never kept track of when a customer was connected or disconnected, they just stopped sending a bill. And that's just one small company! Another company sold LDMI some of their networking equipment, and because they had been using unlimited calling plans, never stored a record of each call. Where will they get that data?

I'm quite sure that the government knows of these record keeping errors. I fear for those caught in the backlash. This is such a massive effort that I can see it going after the wrong people most of the time, with the real threats being able to blend into the noise.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

In order to track all phone conversations, they'd need access to all customers that had that specific phone number at that specific time.

When you have enough computing power, this is a very tractable problem. Guess who one of the biggest purchasers of computer power in the U.S. is?

Correlation of a number vs. who "owns" that number becomes a lot easier when you have access to additional records. Mrs. Smith had that number before it was transferred to Mr. Zarqawi. Thankfully Mr. Zarqawi opened service with Detroit Edison around the same time and listed that as his phone number.

[ericthemage.livejournal.com]

Except that Mrs. Smith rented the place and the electric and gas were in the landlord's name. There's so many variables out there. Real terrorists probably wouldn't leave a paper trail like that.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

Real terrorists probably wouldn't leave a paper trail like that.

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Sometimes the best place to hide is in plain sight and be lost in the noise.

[ericthemage.livejournal.com]

True, but like I said, my biggest fear is all of the false matches that this will generate.

[ericthemage.livejournal.com]

There are so many flaws in this plan, now that I'm thinking about it. There was a customer who scammed many phone companies because they fooled their equipment into thinking that none of the phone calls actually connected on their end, saving tens of thousands of dollars every month. As you know, you don't get charged for calls that don't connect, or if you get a busy signal, or a wrong number recording etc. These calls would not show up on the bill, but logged anyway. They weren't the only one using that trick, either. We caught it after 3 weeks of them tying up the trunks and not being able to bill for a single call.

And all the duplicate and mismatched records...in certain situations a variety of call records can be generated for the same call, making it look like you made a bunch of calls. This is really boggling my mind that someone would even attempt this and expect a reasonable level of accuracy.

[kengr]

Thing is, for "traffic analysis" work (stand SIGINT stuff) you *never* have full and accurate data anyway.

The methods used look for patterns. And were developed to find them in signal intercepts from enemies who were *trying* to confuse things.

So all that erroneous data won't be a problem. Not for what they are mainly doing it for. It'd be a problem if they were trying to use it in other ways, but not for traffic analysis.

btw, I'm way too familiar with the ways phone companies can screw up on call records. I still run a Fidonet node and until a few years ago, had a couple of long distance links.

One LD company I used just *assumed* that any call over some length was a completed call. I had to explain to them about modem negotiation taking as much as 60 seconds and if it failed, the call *wasn't* completed. Offering to mail them rather extensive logging files (every night I automatically zipped up the dasys logs into a zip archive named yyyymmm.zip) made them decide it was a lot less hassle to take my word on the calls.

What is more telling...

[stdharma.livejournal.com]

ia the outlet that blew it first. USA Today is a Republican rag, and the AP picking it up later doesn't help. What does help is every single newspaper, news show and what not is talking about it.

The Democrats are practically being handed a silver hammer. Let's hope they have the strength and guts to wield it proper over the metaphorical heads of these lackwits, thieves and crooks.

Saint Dharma, patron saint of HST

Re: What is more telling...

[devospice.livejournal.com]

Doubt it. The Democrats have a whole collection of silver hammers by now, and they all just seem to be piled in the tool shed out back and forgotten about.

world view

[phaedress.livejournal.com]

You should check out the "Demise of America" series at Pravda:

http://english.pravda.ru/topic/America-120/