NSA acknowledged wiretapping



    During a private meeting in the Capitol, National Security Agency officials admitted that they did not need a court order to listen to internal phone calls in the United States. This was announced by the representative of New York in Congress from the US Democratic Party, Jerrold Nadler; he literally stated that the details could be heard “only on the basis of the decision of the analyst.”

    If there is a need to gain access to data, a decision of an NSA specialist is sufficient; everything is done without any special legal sanctions. It is likely that thousands of low-ranking employees are engaged in wiretapping, which is allowed by the legal interpretation of the US Department of Justice. Since the same standards are applied to emails, SMS and messages of Internet messengers as to phone calls, the NSA most likely also has access to text messages without the permission of the court.

    The disclosed information allows us to conclude that the statement made by Edward Snowden that he could listen to anyone from Hawaii, from the American layman to the US president, is plausible. Then Edward mentioned that not all analysts have such an opportunity.

    Earlier received statements indicate that the NSA has the ability to record almost all domestic and international telephone calls in case you need to have access to them in the future. Last year’s article at Wired talked about how the Agency installed wiretapping equipment to collect and select billions of “both domestic and international” phone calls in a new data center in Utah (pictured above). It is surprising that with such a legal and material basis and a warning from the Russian side, they were not able to prevent the attack of the Tsarnaev brothers.

    Last week, former NSA technical manager William Binney, who helped upgrade the global wiretap network, saidin an interview with the Daily Koller news site that the NSA records and listens for phone calls made by a special list of people containing between 500,000 and 1 million people.

    If we turn to the three-billion-dollar lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation , we can find specific practiced methods of data collection. For example, in 2006, Mark Klein, a technical specialist who had worked at AT&T for more than 22 years, said that internal voice and Internet traffic through optical channels go through a 641A closed room in a company building in San Francisco. Access to this room is exclusively conferred by the NSA.

    Thanks to a law passed by the US Congress in 2008 and extended in 2012 (amendmentsFISA ), AT&T and other companies that allow the NSA to listen to their channels receive full immunity from civil liability and criminal prosecution.

    The fact that NSA employees have access to the contents of telephone conversations was also recognized by the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Diane Feinstein. Phone calls are recorded and calls made in the past within the United States can be accessed, said Tim Clement, a former FBI officer.

    Brewster Cale, based on his own extensive experience as the founder of the Internet Archive, a resource storing petabytes of information, citesCalculating the cost of storing all US internal calls per year in the cloud for processing and analysis. According to him, for this, without taking into account the costs of increased security and access control, only $ 27 million per year will be needed. For comparison: the NSA's annual budget is about $ 10 billion.

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