We're shocked!

[mdlbear]

Shocked, I tell you! To think that the government is tapping our phones!

Am I the only one who isn't surprised? Here we have CNN and Reuters saying that "President George W. Bush denied on Thursday the government was "trolling through" Americans' personal lives, despite a report that [the NSA] was collecting phone records of tens of millions of citizens", and that "Bush did not confirm or deny the USA Today report. But he did say that U.S. intelligence targets terrorists and that the government does not listen to domestic telephone calls without court approval and that Congress has been briefed on intelligence programs."

Am I the only one who thinks that Bush is lying?

Here's what I think is behind the "warrantless wiretapping" program, and why it really has to be warrantless: they're listening to everything. The to/from numbers don't really need to go into a database -- that's how the phone companies keep track of billing. All they have to do is give the government access. That's the part they don't mind leaking. It's annoying, but it's obvious.

The part they don't want to get out, is that, probably, almost every single call is being listened to -- not by humans, of course (so they'll argue in court, if it comes down to it, that it's technically not listening at all) but by computers running speech recognition software. The software isn't very good -- it can't provide even approximate transcripts -- but it doesn't have to be. All it has to do is recognize a handful of keywords (like "bomb") and a couple of languages (like Arabic). That's enough to flag a call for more scrutiny, so they keep the recording and run it past a human. If it seems "suspicious", they look through the call database for a chain of calls linking it to a foreign number or somebody they're watching. Six degrees of separation says they'll probably find such a chain, so off they go to a (secret) court with the evidence they need to tap the phone.

Comments

This is what I'm /really/ worried about...

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

http://toob.livejournal.com/331683.html?style=mine

Wasn't Nixon impeached for this?

Re: This is what I'm /really/ worried about...

[mdlbear]

Yes, but in those days Congress was mostly populated by vertebrates.

Of course they tap the phones of their "enemies".

[mithriltabby]

So we should all greet each other in Arabic on the phone and start using euphemisms like “it’s da bomb”?

[elimloth.livejournal.com]

Project haystack. Fill the wires with hay: Allah Machbar. Bomb, C4, Syntec, yellow cake, oil refinery, dirty, ebola, whatevah.

[ravan.livejournal.com]

Yes, and it can be gamed, just like Google. For starters: slang, discussion of current events, word substitution, alternate languages (eg french and garman), and other things.

So voice recognition will yeild absolute crap, rathole chases, and dead ends, while the terrorists will be laughing at the idiots chasing their own tails, terrorizing our own population.

Morons.