Is it true that US and Canadian federal law enforcement agencies have a voice activated system that is connected to local telephone networks, which activates and records telephone conversations based on certain key words?
I only ask this because a reliable source told me so. However, I am very skeptical because I cant believe any government agency has the authority let alone the technology.
I could tell you all about it, but then I would have to kill you… just kidding.
I can’t speak for our neighbors to the north but here in good old US of A a govenment agency needs to follow fairly strict legal procedures to tap someone’s phone. But I think what you are referring to is the “Big Ear” which I believe was a project of the NSA (National Secruity Agency) which is even more “black ops” than even the CIA. Nobody knows for sure what they do or how exactly they do it… not even Congress.
Are they really doing something like this? Who knows. Could they do something like this? Sure. It’s not technically that difficult although the scale of such a project would be huge considering the amount of telephone traffic there is just in the US…
The biggest question here is, why would they want to? Most folks are a lot more boring than they think. If the NSA hired a few thousand folks to listen to other people’s conversations all day long, the only result for the NSA would be an increase in the suicide rate among agents.
I used to work for British Telecom (about 20 years ago).
In the internal telephone directory, there was a department with over 150 people. It didn’t have a title, but I knew one of them, so I rang and asked him what they did.
“I’m not supposed to tell you - but we tap telephones”.
N.B. About then, in Parliament, a Government Minister said that there had been only been 40 or so telephone taps that year, all of which had been fully authorised by his Department.
So either there were a lot of people sitting on their bums, or the Government spends a huge effort on spying on us (and lying about it).
Not really difficult to decide, is it?
Of course, now they can do wonders with e-mail as well, by computer scanning for key words.
Have a nice day!
I think what Inferno is talking about is the Echelon system at the NSA.
There is no need for agents to go mad listening to dull conversations when a computer will do it for them. Basically a VERY powerful computer (last I heard it was a massively parallel computer sporting over 9000 Pentium II CPU’s but that was several years ago) listens to ALL electronically transmitted communications. Phones, faxes, you name it. The computer keeps a keyword list and sifts through everything it ‘hears’ for buzzwords. Mention ‘president’ and ‘bomb’ in the same sentence and your message gets a little flag for further review by an NSA agent.
Of course, a lot of this smacks of the usual conspiracy theory stuff and there is just enough evidence out there to give it life. Some European governments contend we use it for industrial espionage. One story I remember hearing regarded Airbus and Boeing. Airbus had an inside line to a large (very large) deal in the mid-east when it was shown that Airbus officials were giving out large bribes. The people responsible for deal in the mid-east were sacked and Boeing got the contract. Supposedly Echelon was what got the goods on the Airbus officials. I don’t have a cite for that…just remember hearing it somewhere (starting to smell more like a conspiracy theory?).
Would our governemt do such a thing if it could even though it is an invasion of privacy? My money says absolutely. Does it really exist or exist to the extent that some claim? I don’t know. I’m sure something along these lines exists but I find it hard to believe it is capable of scanning all communications. Such a system would probably be targeted at interesting things and maybe have excess set aside for random searches here and there just to see if anything turns up.
Below are some links to get you started. Take from them what you will.
http://www.dis.org/erehwon/echelon.html
http://serendipity.magnet.ch/hermetic/crypto/echelon/echelon.htm
The BBC has a nice overview of what can be done with Echelon at http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_820000/820758.stm
Searching the BBC site with the word “Echelon” turns up several more stories.
In the late 1980’s, a former government employee (I forgot which agency for whom he worked; I was only a teenager) spoke to my church’s youth group on a career night.
He told us that his agency indeed listened in randomly on many domestic calls, and that there was indeed a voice-activated system that responded as soon as a “keyword” was uttered by one of the callers, wherein computers were able to key in on the call. Calls were subsequently recorded, info was gathered, etc. I believe some of the words were “kill”, “bomb”, and so forth.
He also pointed out that every single international call is monitored.
I would be very wary about secondhand stories told about any sort of “government conspiracy.” In this specific case, think about it: There is no public knowledge of a permanent wiretap in the United States phone system. Someone in the government that would be working in this area would probably be given a high security clearence, including an oath not to reveal any information gained from this position. So, for the stories, this person would be betraying an oath they took. Or they could be making up a story to impress you. We’ve all done that on occasion. Given the choice, I would suspect they are making up a story and not betraying an oath.
I understand that everyone has their own moral code, and a mass wiretap would probably violate it for many people. But if someone gives their word, I expect them to keep it. Betraying that word isn’t the way to show their protest. Resigning in protest, yes. Working from the inside to change it, yes. Betraying their word of honor… absolutely not.
-Psi Cop
It’s quite easy to monitor international calls. They go through a few well defined satellite or fiber-optic links that could easily be tapped.
But domestic calls, at least in the US, would be very difficult to monitor in secret. Thin about it. An average local call may only go through a single very small switching station run by Podunk Telco. What are the odds that all those telephone workers would “ignore” that extra little monitoring box that would be quite obvious to them and not say anything to anyone about it?
Quoth Whack-a-Mole:
It’s that “further review” that I’m talking about. I imagine that most of those keywords get mentioned pretty often in American phone conversations. Even if we leave out the folks actually talking about assassination, what about things like “I don’t think that the President should have ordered those bombing raids”? There’s no computer system in existance today which would be able to identify that as a non-threat… It’s not a matter of processing power, it’s just that nobody knows how to program a computer to do that. That means that every time a person said something like that, you’d need to call a human agent in to check it. That’s a lot of man-hours.
Besides, if we have a system like that in place, then why didn’t they catch Timothy McVeigh before the bombing, or the World Trade Center bombers, or the Unibomber?
SmackFu, the telephone workers point is an interesting one. If anyone was going to reveal this massive “wiretap” effort, it would probably be the local AT&T techs that took note of all those unmarked monitoring boxes they were ordered to ignore… It wouldn’t be the sworn-to-secrecy government workers.
Besides, there is the logistics problem. There are ~280 million people in the United States, and I suspect that easily that number of phone calls are made per day. A massive computer setup would be needed to scan that volume. And can you imagine the man-hours it would take to listen and/or review the calls with the “keywords?”
-Psi Cop
The British tech site The Register claims to have a list of the keywords Echelon searches for. They’re ambivalent on whether they believe the list is genuine or not.
It’s definitely a genuine system, though. The European Parliament has a working group investigating it:
Composition of the Temporary Committee on the Echelon Interception System
I think Chronos made the best point on this topic: If there was such a thing, why didn’t they catch Tim McVeigh…etc beforehand?. Not to mention that the fact that none of this would be admissable in court would make it totally pointless.
In case ya don’t, the Clipper was a chip designed to encrypt e-mail. It was designed by the US government. The idea was that only 3 groups could read your e-mail:you, the recipeient, and Uncle Sam. There was a lot of debate over whether mandatory use of the Clipper was legal or desirable. A group of hackers cracked the encryption and posted the key on numerous sites.
My point is that the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc would use Echelon if they could build it. I don’t think that they can. In the 70’s, anyone with aligator clips and headphones could tap a phone call. Now, we have more traffic on a much more complex system.
It seems unlikely that the Feds have a computer capable of understanding normal speech. Voice recognition systems can’t handle speech at average speed, or with normal intonations, or accents, or slang. For security purposes, Echelon would have to recognise key words in many languages. Spanish is the second most spoken language in the US. With Osama Bin Laden, Arabic and Aramaic would be necessary. The government can’t build an Osprey or a missile defense system that works. How could they build Echelon?
I am highly skeptical of admissions from federal agents. Forget oaths or honor. Such an admission would violate federal law and bring swift and brutal punishment. One of my friends is an ex-Marine. According to him any civilian asking whether a ship has nuclear capability is told “I can neither confirm nor deny that.” While such an answer does serve some legitimate purposes, it’s main goal is to impress yokels and attractive women. An accountant or filing clerk working for the FBI tells stories of phone tapping and black ops for the same reason.
Even if Echelon did exist, couldn’t anyone avoid
detection by using a simple code?
EG instead of "How are the bombs coming along? I
wanna kill the President already!"
"Are you through fixing that stereo yet? Hurry up
so I can deliver it to Louie on schedule!"
I was looking through the list and thinking of what Chronos said. I agree it would take a lot of man hours, I also agree that if the system is in place and they listened to EVERY flag that was put up, they probably would have caught people before the crime happened.
(I also believe that there is probably a LOT more crime stopped before it happens than we know about. Way more than the actual terrorist stuff that does actually happen. My guess, McVeigh et al. is the exception not the rule.)
My other guess-- like Chronos said-- if we checked EVERY red flag that popped up it would take forever. If I were designing the system I would design somewhat of a danger factor. For example… I saw Tomlinson on that list…
If I say… “I’m really excited that the Chargers got Ladanian Tomlinson.” Gets me a Danger Factor of 1 and would likely be ignored.
If I say… “The President is DA BOMB!” Danger Factor of 2.
So on and so forth. If I were designing the system, I might even also provide certain words a higher danger factor. At that point have the computer assess-- were there certain phone calls that had particularly high “danger factor” numbers. Or are there certain people who never seem to be able to avoid having phone conversations without having high “danger factor” numbers. At that point you still have a high number of calls, but certainly much more manageable. People like McVeigh were probably just able to keep their numbers low.
That’s just a guess… but I’m thinking of I were designing the system, thats how I would do it.
It just occurred to me, while sitting on my front porch a full 16 hours after having last read this thread, isn’t it the Unabomber? Sorry…
It makes me wonder with all this talk of keywords, if the NSA (or whoever) is monitoring this thread because some of the keywords we’ve used. Could there conceivably be an electronic version of Echelon, monitoring all of our internet activity? Has some computer somewhere now captured the profiles of all those who posted to this thread? Moreover, is there a database log somewhere that lists the contents of my hard drive?
The answer as to why they didn’t catch McVeigh with it is simple: I believe the system only monitors international traffic. There are constitutional protections against unauthorized or blanket wiretaps on domestic calls. But once that data leaves U.S. jurisdiction, it enters the domain of the NSA.