NSA recognized the fact of wiretapping

During a closed meeting in the Capitol, employees of the National Security Agency admitted that they did not need an appropriate court decision to listen to domestic phone calls in the United States. This was announced by the representative of the New York in the Congress of the US Democratic Party, Gerrold Nadler; he literally stated that the details can be heard "only on the basis of the analyst's decision".

If it is necessary to obtain access to the data, the decision of the 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 e-mails, SMS messages and instant messengers are set to the same standards as phone calls, the NSA most likely also has access to text messages without the permission of the courts.
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The information disclosed allows us to conclude that the statement made by Edward Snowden that he could listen to anyone from Hawaii, from the average American to the President of the United States, is quite plausible. Then Edward mentioned that not all analysts have such an opportunity.

Previously received statements suggest that the NSA has the ability to record almost all domestic and international telephone conversations in case you need to have access to them in the future. Last year's article in Wyred said that the Agency had installed listening equipment to collect and select billions of "both domestic and international" telephone calls in the new data center in Utah (in the photo above). Surprisingly, with such a legal and material basis and a warning to the Russian side, they did not manage to prevent the terrorist attack by the Tsarnaev brothers.

Last week, former NSA technical manager William Binnie, who helped modernize the global wiretapping network, said in an interview with the Daily Koller news site that the NSA is recording and listening to phone calls made by a special list of people containing from 500,000 to 1 million. person.

If we turn to the three billion claim statement of the Electronic Frontier Foundation , we can find specific practiced methods for extracting data. For example, in 2006, Mark Klein, a technical specialist who has worked at AT & T for more than 22 years, said that internal voice and Internet traffic through optical channels pass through the closed room 641A in the company's building in San Francisco. Access to this room has only authorized persons of the NSA.

Thanks to a law passed by the US Congress in 2008 and extended in 2012 ( FISA amendments), AT & T and other companies that allow the NSA to listen in on their channels receive complete 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, Diana Feinstein. The fact that telephone conversations are being recorded and that calls made in the past within the United States can be accessed, mentioned Tim Clement, a former FBI official.

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