NSA spying flap extends to contents of U.S. phone calls

Remember how Glenn Greenwald speculated that the NSA was capable of listening to the contents of phone calls? It turns out to be true.

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls, a participant said.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”

If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

I had heard rumors of an AT&T facility in Kansas that transcribed millions of phone calls. Supposedly AT&T’s voice recognition software was highly developed for this purpose. Can’t find anything about it online, though, and not sure where I learned of it.

Also, read the Washington Post’s story on the NUCLEON program.

via NSA spying flap extends to contents of U.S. phone calls | Politics and Law – CNET News.

The Idea Factory

theideafactory
I’m reading a fascinating book about the legendary Bell Labs, called “The Idea Factory” by Jon Gertner. I knew Bell Labs was responsible for many of the innovations we take for granted now, but seeing them all in print was amazing.

It is simply astonishing to consider how this research lab changed our world. For instance, Bell Labs invented the transistor, semiconductors, and photolithography, all of which are absolutely crucial for modern electronics. Scientists at Bell built the world’s first communications satellite after serendipitously inventing the major technologies needed for it. Perhaps the most important technology that came from Bell Labs was information theory, which sprang from a brilliant Bell Labs scientist named Claude Shannon. Wikipedia explains its impact:

Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics, electrical engineering, bioinformatics, and computer science involving the quantification of information. Information theory was developed by Claude E. Shannon to find fundamental limits on signal processing operations such as compressing data and on reliably storing and communicating data. Since its inception it has broadened to find applications in many other areas, including statistical inference, natural language processing, cryptography, neurobiology,[1] the evolution[2] and function[3] of molecular codes, model selection[4] in ecology, thermal physics,[5] quantum computing, plagiarism detection[6] and other forms of data analysis.[7]

Applications of fundamental topics of information theory include lossless data compression (e.g. ZIP files), lossy data compression (e.g. MP3s and JPGs), and channel coding (e.g. for Digital Subscriber Line (DSL)). The field is at the intersection of mathematics, statistics, computer science, physics, neurobiology, and electrical engineering. Its impact has been crucial to the success of the Voyager missions to deep space, the invention of the compact disc, the feasibility of mobile phones, the development of the Internet, the study of linguistics and of human perception, the understanding of black holes, and numerous other fields. Important sub-fields of information theory are source coding, channel coding, algorithmic complexity theory, algorithmic information theory, information-theoretic security, and measures of information.

Shannon did work on cryptography during World War II; his paper A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography was so groundbreaking that it remains classified to this day.

Without Bell Labs, we’d have no home computers, no smartphones (actually no cellphones of any kind), no solar panels, no communications satellites, no lasers, no UNIX, no Internet, no C or C++ computer languages, and no Silicon Valley, for starters. Scientists and researchers at Bell Labs literally invented the future.

The Idea Factory is a fascinating look at how so many world-changing technologies could’ve come from one place. Those who walked the halls of Bell Labs were truly giants.

Here are a few other reviews of the book, from BusinessWeek and the New York Times.

Tanning no more

Once upon a time in my foolish youth I thought it was cool to get a suntan. There were many summers during my teens where I would “sunbathe” with almost nothing protecting my skin. Several times I got a crispy result.

The turning point for me was a visit to Hong Kong with the Navy back in 1991. Many of the crew and I visited a water theme park in the hills above the city. It was blazing hot so I removed my shirt, I had no sunscreen, and I was on a mountain in the tropics for several hours. I had huge blisters on my back for the rest of the week and came very close to requesting a light duty chit to recover from that foolhardy damage. Never again would I take that for granted, I vowed.
Continue reading →

Zeo says goodnight

I was sad to learn this evening that Zeo, the makers of a wonderful sleep-tracking device, shut its doors late last year. It’s a real shame.

Since late last year it has been something of an open secret in some digital health circles that Newton, Massachusetts-based sleep monitoring and coaching company Zeo was winding down its operations and searching for a buyer. At least one investor was making veiled references to the company running out of money during various question-and-answer periods at the mHealth Summit in Washington DC last year. Zeo’s absence from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this year — a must-attend for any company selling devices and companion services to consumers — was telling.

via Exclusive: Sleep coach company Zeo is shutting down | mobihealthnews.

Hallie leaves elementary school

Hallie's first day of school, 29 Aug 2007.

Hallie’s first day of school, 29 Aug 2007.


Today is Hallie’s last day at Conn Elementary school. It was 2007 but it seems like only yesterday we received the thrilling news that Hallie was accepted into Conn’s magnet program. On visiting Conn at its open house, Hallie was thrilled as well:

“I love it so much I want to kiss the whole school!”

“I don’t think anybody is as happy as I am!”

“This is the greatest day of my whole life!”

“I’m so overjoyed I feel like I’ve got a bellyache!”

“I don’t think I can wait one bit for Conn!”

“I wish they’d named it ‘I love it!’”

“When I first went down there I felt a bit scared and look at me now!”

And, on our way out of the parking lot, “Turn around!”

Now our girl is bound for Ligon and the future is just as bright for her. Still, it’s a day that reminds me how fleeting life is, how quickly the days pass, and how we don’t get to do any of those days over again.

Pardon me if I’m a weepy mess today.

Avila and the broadband divide

It’s refreshing to see Rep. Marilyn Avila express some concern about the lack of broadband.

Avila was praised by N&O executive editor John Drescher in her defense of requiring local governments buy newspaper space for their legal notices:

“Are our citizens going to have to bookmark every website for every department in every division and check it every day to figure out what we’re up to down here?” she asked, adding that many residents don’t have Internet access.

Continue reading →

NextDoor and silos

Searching around this morning, I found this insightful comment on NextDoor which echoes my concerns. It was posted on a message board way back in October 2011:

How tragic that I could sign up to *heyneighbor.com* and *not* be connected to all my neighbours who happened to signed up to *nextdoor.com* And every new venture in this space could serve to silo people as much as it connects them. These business models contain paradox – they can only succeed in a neighbourhood if they have a monopoly.

There’s a lot of truth here.

via Post in Another one … NextDoor.com: Locals Online – For hosts of neighborhood e-lists, placeblogs, and community social nets: E-Democracy.org.

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

In addition to collecting call detail records, there is some speculation that phone conversations themselves are being harvested. Recall this exchange from last month, as reported by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian:

On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”

via Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government? | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers

Yesterday it was revealed that the National Security Agency is collecting millions of phone records from Verizon:

The National Security Agency is currently collecting the telephone records of millions of US customers of Verizon, one of America’s largest telecoms providers, under a top secret court order issued in April.

The order, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, requires Verizon on an "ongoing, daily basis" to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

The document shows for the first time that under the Obama administration the communication records of millions of US citizens are being collected indiscriminately and in bulk – regardless of whether they are suspected of any wrongdoing.

Today, the Wall Street Journal claims this extends to AT&T and Sprint customers, too. Yesterday, The Guardian revealed PRISM, a Top Secret NSA program to directly query social media servers owned Facebook, Google, Apple, and others.

I suppose the idea of “innocent until proven guilty” got left behind somewhere in the 20th century.

via NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily | World news | The Guardian.