more on Did NSA phone call surveillance include local call records?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Simon Higgs <simon () higgs com>
Date: May 12, 2006 2:00:54 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net, Richard Wiggins <richard.wiggins () gmail com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Did NSA phone call surveillance include local call  
records?

Dave,

All calls have to be accounted for and even the free ones are metered  
@ $0.00. It's one part of the phone company's planning and  
forecasting requirements. Local law enforcement uses local phone  
records frequently (ask any crime analyst). The conversations are not  
monitored, but the calling patterns will frequently identify who is  
giving out instructions and who is performing tasks. The California  
DoJ Crime and Intelligence Analysts Certificate specifies the  
following: "Use telephone toll analysis to plot telephone activity to  
determine the size and location of criminal groups and individuals  
involved."

In this particular case, the NSA is just a giant aggregator,  
vacuuming up existing data from thousands of local switches via the  
parent phone companies. The NSA compiles data from any sources it has  
access to under the "better to ask forgiveness than ask permission"  
doctrine. This is exactly what any prudent intelligence gatherer  
does. The common problem is that, along the way, it acquires  
"permission" from sources that "voluntarily" hand over data that  
stretch legal precedents (some are outright illegal). This problem  
goes all the way back to the Black Chamber illegally processing  
Western Union telegrams as long ago as 1919.

Simon

At 02:05 AM 5/12/2006, David Farber wrote:
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Richard Wiggins <richard.wiggins () gmail com>
> Date: May 11, 2006 11:18:01 PM EDT
> To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
> Subject: Did NSA phone call surveillance include local call records?
>
> Dave,
>
> News reports say that millions of domestic phone call records,
> showing presumably the numbers calling and called, were harvested by
> the NSA.
>
> Did this include local -- non-long distance, non-metered -- phone
> calls?  Did it include calls within a local switch?
>
> Traditional phone companies keep records of long distance calls for
> billing purposes, as do cell providers.  But there is no reason for a
> phone company to keep records of purely local phone calls, especially
> those initiated and completed within a local switch.
>
> If phone companies are capturing detailed records of local landline
> phone calls, we have a much bigger story than reported so far.  Since
> most if not all central offices now have digital switches, it'd be
> easy to capture local calling records.
>
> But why?
>
> /rich
>
> From the NYT:
>
> The USA Today article on Thursday went further, saying that the
> N.S.A. had created an enormous database of all calls made by
> customers of the three phone companies in an effort to compile a log
> of "every call ever made" within this country. The report said one
> large phone company, Qwest, had refused to cooperate with the N.S.A.
> because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over
> customer information to the government without warrants.
>
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Best Regards,

Simon Higgs



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