Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?

I've said it before and I'll say it again: anonymity online and encrypted communications are one of the most important problems we're going to going to face in the coming decades. Hackers should be working on those, not clever ways to serve ads or geolocating your latest locally-sourced coffee.<p>If you don't believe the US is already permanently archiving vast swaths of communication, it's not a big leap of imagination to picture it happening in five or ten years. Likewise the government might not have the computer power to <i>analyze</i> those archives <i>today</i>, but in five or ten years, I'd bet on it.<p>Some people don't mind that the government stores their emails. "I'm fine with it because I know they're going to catch the bad guys" or "I'm fine with it because I have nothing to hide". Those are certainly powerful (though flawed) arguments for the situation <i>today</i>. Those people are perhaps picturing filing cabinets in some dank warehouse filled with paper printouts of their emails, which due to space constraints will be shredded or forgotten in ten years. The reality is that thanks to technology, what we say today is being stored and archived <i>for-ev-er</i> and can be indexed and retrieved <i>easily and indefinitely</i>. Why does that make a difference? Because <i>today</i>, what you say and do might be lawful. But laws and societies change over time, and the government will still be able to go back and dig up what you said decades ago and use it against you.<p>That's really what scares me--because today, I, like most people, don't have much to hide. But who knows what laws or culture will be like in 20 years, and what can be used against me that I said so very long ago? Can you imagine working at the WTC and having a bad day, and jokingly sending an email to a coworker about bombing the place because you're so mad. 9/11 happens a year later, the government looks in its archives for the email you sent, and in a post-9/11 frenzy sends you to Guantanamo to "await trial". Or it doesn't even have to go that far; some government spokesperson lets your name slip in an interview as a "suspect" and the media attention you'll get will forever ruin your life even if the government does nothing.

My recollection of the NSA's legal interpretation is that they feel they don't need a warrant to record everyone's traffic; they only need a warrant for a human to subsequently access those recordings.<p>The twist this puts on "having nothing to hide" is that it means you have to trust everything you say now will <i>forever</i> be considered benign, rather than just at this particular moment in history.<p>Open Whisper Systems is a project I work on to help untap your phone: <a href="http://www.whispersystems.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.whispersystems.org</a>

The first question that comes to my mind - is this technically and economically possible?<p>How many minutes does the average person spend on the phone per day? I found some numbers in the range from 6 to 28 minutes per day. Let's just pick 15 minutes. This times the population of the states (313.9 million) divided by two yields 39,237,500 hours per day. Storing this at 8 kbps requires about 128.5 TiB per day or 45.8 PiB per year.<p>At $40 per TiB this is less than 2 million dollars per year. So technically and economically this should actually be possible. But that is just storing. Performing speech recognition, analyzing the data and extracting information is probably the much harder task and I would guess that it is still infeasible to do this with all phone calls.

I kind of doubt that they have every phone conversation recorded and archived for all time. But I'm not sure what exactly the incentive is to tell people that they do. If they said, "no, we can't get any of that", it would encourage criminals to be sloppy (and us citizens to not scrutinize them too much). But they say, "yeah, we have everything", which encourages the criminals to use strong cryptography. (And if they've broken AES, they're probably not going to publicly reveal that to our enemies by using it against you in your drug possession case.)<p>It just doesn't make much sense.

If the government is already recording everything, why do they have to reach out and reprogram cards to get access to specific people? [1] I think the illegal things the government does to get more access is evidence they don't have total access at this time.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/verizon-rigmaiden-aircard" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/verizon-rigmaiden-a...</a>

If it is happening, it might some day be culturally accepted. There are steps after that. Are you allowed access to your own history? One big business aspect of gmail is that - easy searchability of your whole email history. It will contain stuff written by other people as well. Will there be some policy of email expiration?<p>In the end we get to something like in science fiction. Hannu Rajaniemi's Quantum Thief has externalized common memory and also your private memories that can be recovered. Also pieces of them that can be shared directly. Such centralized systems have a whole host of new security problems.

my first thought was, "what's a recording?"<p>is buffering packets in a network device a recording? using metadata for traffic/performance analysis?

Probably voicing an opinion in this thread might get you investigated at some point in the future....

This thing is always coming up, will someone show me some actual evidence and I am not talking some crack pot agent turned whistle blower saying "THAT DO THIS AND THAT", not ECHELON and not the base they are building. I am talking evidence. Logging every single thing? Everything? The data storage that would be required for that is insane. All of these "whistle blowers" have something in common, they are making money off of this, from books to interviews. I am not about to trust them any more than I am their previous employers. Why is it I am ment to question everything the US does but I am ment to blindly trust anyone who says they are doing something like this?

Are skype calls being recorded now too? They had pretty good security until recently. The independent security review they posted on their site is like.. 8 years old now.

The more data they have the less they know. Most people with extreme voiced opinions will do nothing. Thinking doesn't mean doing and doing doesn't mean thinking.