I have a friend who states that the government monitors and will record phone calls of citizens when certain words are used. Does anyone know if thus actually happens, and if not, is such a thing actually possible.
The government can tap individual phone lines with a warrant, and you may recall there’s been a bit of a controversy of late about intelligence agencies recording certain calls originating from the US without first obtaining a warrant.
That said, it seems rather unlikely that the government (or anyone else) could monitor all phone traffic scanning for certain words. For one thing, the phone network is extremely decentralized, and this project would require monitoring equipment at every local central office and long-distance switching station in the country. And all that equipment would have to be installed without any of the phone company employees knowing what it is.
Given that they couldn’t even keep this one a secret for very long, it seems rather unlikely. (And we still have no idea what kind of traffic, or how much, if any, was being monitored by that system.)
The NSA (National Security Agency) used to be jokingly called No Such Agency because Congress wasn’t even aware of their existence for decades despite their big honking headquarters full of the latest spy equipment and a big black-hole in the federal budget.
Their very existence strongly suggests that they do tap and record phone calls, e-mails and whatever else they can get their hands on. The standard line is that they only do it internationally for U.S. security purposes and not domestically but who are we kidding? They have gotten caught either tapping or trying to tap domestic phone and internet communications over the years. My strong guess is that they do it when it supports their needs although it would have to be highly targeted at least for phone call spying because the volume is just too high.
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fung_Wah_Bus_Transportation_Inc.
"The NSA’s eavesdropping mission includes radio broadcasting, both from various organizations and individuals, the Internet, telephone calls, and other intercepted forms of communication. Its secure communications mission includes military, diplomatic, and all other sensitive, confidential or secret government communications. "
Your friend is probably thinking of ECHELON
Who do you think provides the NSA’s budget? Just because certain budget items are secret does not mean Congress is unaware of them. They write the appropriations bills.
Do you mean Congress in the general sense or some select subcommittee? Congress in general certainly does not know about much of the U.S. intelligence operations. Congress includes over 500 people including representative Joe Schmoe from Iowa and that many people can’t keep anything secret.
I started a thread a while ago on this that was very informative. I wanted to know how secret intelligence operations got past Congress and the general federal bureaucracy. There were (and maybe still are) CIA operations like Iran-Contra that just bypassed the whole thing altogether and there is no reason to believe that the NSA wouldn’t do something illegal and there is good evidence that they have.
I will see if I can find the thread.
Here you go.
I learned a lot in this thread and some of it is a little disconcerting.
Do the President and Congress know what the CIA is up to all the time?
Originally posted by Ravenman:
"The President is responsible for knowing what the CIA is up to. The Constitution declares that the executive power of the US government is vested in him. The CIA would not have a leg to stand on to keep secrets from the President.
The Congress, however, presents a much more complicated question. After the abuses of power by intelligence agencies throughout the '60s and '70s, Congress created intelligence committees to oversee the CIA and its operations. Although the work of the committees is strictly secret, there are some times in which secrets are too sensitive for even this handful of Senators and Congressmen to know.
For these times, the CIA and the White House are expected to inform the Chairman and Ranking Member of the intelligence committees, and the four leaders of the House and Senate as well. The notification of these ultra-secret operations may be delayed somewhat, because the law requires simply “timely” notification of such decisions. In Iran-Contra, for example, the popular story was that Reagan Administration officials planned to notify Congress of the arms sales on the last day of the Reagan presidency.
As an interesting note, however, let’s say you are Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and you are told of some outrageous plot by the CIA. Only seven others in Congress were also informed. What are you gonna do? Who can you complain to, other than the President? The information is so highly classified, simply being informed of these black operations isn’t terribly useful from the point of view of maintaining checks and balances on the power of the Executive Branch."
OK, maybe I should elaborate. His insistence that this program existed was based on my making fun of movies where there is some unknown hacker on a phone somewhere talking, and he says some word the gov’t has flagged, and all of a sudden, the NSA has picked up his live phone call. I don’t see how this is possible. He insisted that all phone calls can be monitored and taped based on the speaker’s utterance of certain words. I could see certain people being targeted and routinely monitored, but I don’t see how it would be possible to monitor every phone call.
FTR, I have no dispute at all with Shagnasty’s quote of my contribution to that thread, but I will add three points:
-
The NSA would fall under the basically the same oversight procedures as the CIA, but the NSA, being part of the Defense Department, also comes under the jurisdiction of the Armed Services Committees of Congress.
-
I have often heard that “Congress didn’t know of the NSA” for many years, but I’ve never seen anyone provide an authoritative cite to that fact. I have no evidence that Congress did know of the NSA, but I have a very hard time believing that nobody knew of the NSA. There have been other classified intelligence agencies (like the National Reconnaissance Office) which had their existence shrouded in secrecy, but so far as I know, there’s no reason to believe that the appropriate members of Congress didn’t know. Not that there aren’t oversight problems: the NRO was dinged about ten years ago for illegally squirreling away billions in funds that Congress appropriated to it.
-
What little I know of this particular subject, I agree with friedo. I think it is all well and good to be suspicious of what the government is doing behind closed doors, but jumping to the conclusion that Shagnasty has made – more or less, if it can be done, it is being done – I think is going from suspicion to leaping to a conclusion. I think the honest answer is, we don’t know for sure, but it would be amazingly complex to do.
And seeing as how the 9/11 hijacker’s phone calls weren’t analyzed till a few days after the attacks, I don’t think any of us really need to worry about automatically getting put on a watch list because we use the word BOMB on a cell phone call.
I don’t think they are doing it on the scale described by the OP either. The linked Wikipedia gives a high estimate of about 46,000 NSA employees worldwide. The NSA has numerous missions and most of those won’t include eavesdropping on domestic phone calls. Even if we generously say that 10,000 are then many of those will be managers or military officers. No one works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week so they would have a few thousand people at most eavesdropping on phone calls at any one time. The volume of calls in the U.S. is simply too high to handle.
The technology to identify key words and start recording for analysis is pretty easy these days but they would likely end up with thousands of recordings a day plus the actual research work they need to investigate them. The only hope would be some quasi-artificial intelligence software like Google to sort it all out but real artificial intelligence is what would be needed for this and that doesn’t exist as far as I know.
Still, past history makes me believe they are phone-tapping some people in the U.S. no matter what their techniques are.
How would it be possible for anyone to constantly monitor every phone call in the US looking for code words?
I don’t think it would unless they came up with elaborate artificial intelligence system that also figured out high risk people. The NSA hires some of the brightest PhD’s im existence so maybe they invented something like Google for the intelligence set. I highly doubt though so they probably focus on people that other intelligence has brought to their attention.
Like 'ol Ben Franklin said, “Three men can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
If some podunk start up company can do it, the NSA can do it, and probably do it a lot better. They also probably have the technology to tap into every call in the U.S. given the assistance of the phone companies. Whether or not they have that access and/or whether they are using it is top secret. Given the fact that the tapping of international calls was leaked, I doubt that they could keep the fact that they are tapping every phone call in the U.S. secret.
Source: Baltimore Sun - Sept 20, 2007
As more and more ordinary telecommunications shift to VoIP and similar networks, rest assured the NSA will already be there.