All calls in the Netherlands are stored, indexed and searched for keywords(translate.google.com) |
All calls in the Netherlands are stored, indexed and searched for keywords(translate.google.com) |
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=nl&tl=en&u=ht...
It is however worth mentioning that we have this CIOT system which is a publicly known and automated system that actually provides automated access to name and address details of any given Dutch IP address. The system is updated with ISPs' data every morning and can be queried at will. ISPs, even the most privacy-aware one (XS4ALL) do not give statistics of how often their part of the database was queried (I asked them), but it has been made public that the database had a total of 2.6 million queries over 2010 and 2.9 in 2009. That's one in six citizens' data queried for no apparent reason.
Tech details: The CIOT system is a centralized search dispatcher, that queries systems provided by individual ISPs. A government official can enter an IP there and within seconds all ISPs have been queried and one probably returns a match.
Yes, because secret services have been known to strictly follow the law, and not do anything without telling you first.
http://ripe58.ripe.net/content/presentations/ciot.pdf
it says 250k queries per month... kinda hard to get warrants for all of them i guess
A lot of people underestimate the amount of storage it would take to store all voice data.
http://www.telegeography.com/press/press-releases/2012/01/09... says there were 438 billion international (because that's all the NSA collects, right?) calling minutes in 2011 (in the world... not just the Netherlands).
Aberdeen will sell you 1 PB of storage for $495k: http://www.aberdeeninc.com/abcatg/petarack.htm
A narrowband speech codec will encode calls in excellent quality (for the PSTN) at 12 kbps.
So that's 438 * 10^9 minutes * 60 seconds/minute * 12000 bits/second / (8 bits/byte * 10^15 bytes/petabyte) (using lying harddrive manufacturer's definitions of a petabyte) = 39.42 PB.
Or less than $20mln/year. Which of course is the quoted budget of PRISM.
I'm actually curious how much text data this would be per day; number of call minutes * average number of words per minute. I'd be surprised if that wouldn't fit in a reasonable cluster.
They do have a lot of eavesdrop approvals though, or so I heard from a colleague. (But that still doesn't mean they capture all the calls.)
Anyhow, why does it matter that much. If you have something to hide, then I'd be sweating. If not, who really gives a sh*te if people are tapping into our digital lives.
Facebook, Google and rest are just as bad as the governments. They are invading us with advertisements in all parts of our digital life.
If people are worried about it, turn your crap off.
Because your "something to hide" may be something that is currently legal / acceptable / non-embarrassing / etc., but becomes illegal / unacceptable / embarrassing / threatening to those in power / etc. in the future. And because governments have been known to collect data, nominally for legal reasons, and use it for political purposes, to threaten, harass and intimidate people based on their political affiliation.
All of that said, it really comes down to the principle of the thing. I've said - and will continue to say - plenty of things that could endanger me in some hypothetical future. I actually tend to be very public with most of my thoughts, rants, ramblings, and what-not, as I have an attitude of "If you don't like what I say, fuck you" directed at the government and pretty much everybody else. I have almost nothing to hide. BUT... not everybody has that attitude, and some people care more about keeping their "stuff" private. And even I want the option of keeping certain things private when the need arises. Just because I'm, say, 99% transparent (whatever that means) doesn't lessen the importance of that "1% secret". And that's the rub... everybody probably has at least "1%" of things that they do want to keep private/secret, now or in the future. And they should have the option to do that if they want.
We have a public transport system here that functioned just fine using anonymous cards, and it got replaced by one that allows near perfect tracking of every individual using public transport. Why anybody would want to is a good question, but it is the system we've got and the data is being kept.
So let's add bandwidth: the most expensive estimate I've seen is $0.019/GB <http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2011/04/07/what-does-a-gigaby.... Let's assume the original audio is captured using G.711 (64 kbps). So that's 438 * 10^9 minutes * 60 seconds/minute * 64000 bits/second / (8 bits/byte * 1024^3 bytes/GB) * $0.019/GB = $3.72mln.
Let's add CPU: A medium-sized, high-CPU AWS instance is $0.0024/minute <http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/>. A moderate laptop-class processor can encode and decode 150 channels/core in real time <http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtcweb/current/msg05236.... So that's 438 * 10^9 call minutes * $0.0024/CPU minute / 150 call minutes/CPU minute = $7.01mln.
Facility: The NSA's Utah facility is projected to cost $1.5...$2bln <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center> and will contain a 100,000 square foot data center <http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/>. A 42U rack is about 7 square feet. Let's assume a floor occupancy of 25%. That's $2bln/facility / 10000 ft^2/facility * (7/0.25) ft^2/PB * 40 PB = $22.4mln.
I don't have a good estimate of the personnel involved, but I doubt it'd require anything out of the ballpark of the other numbers here. You could have every rack maintained and operated by its own PhD-level researcher at less than $10mln/year including all overhead and benefits.
A single JSF F-35A has a $207.6mln procurement cost (excluding R&D costs, maintenance costs, and operating costs) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-35_Lightning_II#Program_cost_....
Transcribing all voice calls to text in the Netherlands computationally could easily be two orders of magnitude more difficult than Google voice.
The machine transcription remains incredibly valuable for broad surveillance even though it is highly imperfect.
Have you ever been here? There are cameras on all highways that recognize license plates and track the movement over every car on the road network (cfr: the ease with which they tracked the whereabouts of the father who killed his children a few weeks ago), it has the most phone taps per inhabitant (to the extent that if you look at the data, it seems like somebody accidentally types a few numbers too much when typing it into Excel, that's how far we are removed from the runner up), and in general the amount of information the government has on every citizen is staggering (e.g. the age at which you first grew pubes (!) ).
At Schiphol you are searched at will - a few years ago I was on a flight back from the Caribbean and everybody on the plane was searched - thoroughly, more intense than when you are searched e.g. at sports events. Every city has autonomous authority to designate certain areas as 'search at will' areas - police can (and will), without cause, search you and your belongings (including your car - US doctrine about the car being an extension of a man's house? Hahaha, yeah, in the sense that it doesn't take much to search your house, either...). Most train stations are such zones, but most of the city centers of the bigger cities are, too (let that sink in - there a whole city center where police, without any cause, can search you and your belongings!)
Oh, not carrying ID (anywhere)? €90 fine, and you can be taken into custody until you have proven your identity. No cause necessary for asking for it, either.
Invading has never been a strategy generally employed here, the Dutch are merchants, war is bad for business (I'm sure there's a fitting Ferengi quote here...) Plus a country the size of a flyspeck on a global map just doesn't generally have the muscle.
Look, I still love my country, and for all its flaws it's still the best place on earth to live for me - but let's not kid ourselves, the surveillance state is alive and kicking here, and the 'OMG the terrorists are coming' sentiment is, too.
Not quite 'papieren, bitte' yet, and not as dramatic as I made it sound, but still not what one would expect in a land claiming to value freedom. (my other points still stand though, including those about the 'no cause search' zones)
Rule of Acquisition 34: War is good for business. Rule of Acquisition 35: Peace is good for business.
And that whole Dutch East Indies and Indonesia thing still has some repercussions till this day.
Schiphol is organised better than most comparable airports, and it has improved dramatically in the last 5 years, but the level of actual harassment can still be quite high (seems to vary by day).
Schiphol was not that bad the few times I've used it (last three weeks ago), IIRC they do the actual scan at gates which I think is always the superior option.
Completely agree on the EU/US comparison, of course. You can actually see how European aviation has now fully caught up and often surpassed its US counterpart -- US infrastructure looks old and creaky, often not fit for purpose, and thanks to TSA it now feels more like a series of gulags than a 3rd-millennium transportation network.
All outbound travel to the US has to go through the porno scanners, each and every time I have flown to the US I have opted out, just like I have opted out each time I get asked to go through the porno scanner in the US...
They don't make a fuss about it either, they just ask you to stand with your legs spread wide and arms spread and do a pat down/magnetic wand.
Not as bad as the US where you get put into a sort of metal "hot box" where you are told to wait till they can find someone with a low enough IQ to grope you, followed by the question if you really want to opt-out, and the agent doing everything in his power to make it as uncomfortable for the person they are checking as possible. Only that tends to backfire on them, cause most of those idiots are giant homophobes... so playing with them while getting groped is kinda fun.