UK.
Been known that is happening.
Is the UK the number one hotbed of terrorism? How soon until we find out that this is also widespread in the US?
I’m more interested in the method the use. Don’t they need some sort of hardware access for phone calls made only inside a country? I’m no tech expert but I do understand that internet traffic is rerouted multiple times often through foreign hubs even if the websites server is located inside the same country. Is the same true for phone calls? If an irish citizen is calling another irish citizen via landline how is it possible to intercept the communication ( especially in large volumes) without access to in-country telecommunication infrastructure?
The method they use doesn’t matter; the fact is, they do it.
Because it would be interesting to know if my government is colluding with the US by providing access or if foreign telecommunication providers operating in my country (Vodafone) are providing assistance.
I’m not a telco expert; but my understanding is that phone traffic (while architecturally pretty much packet-switched VOIP-esque stuff at this point, line-switched is Dead except at a few points at the margins) doesn’t slosh around quite as much as internet traffic because it’s all quite latency sensitive, and because (even more so historically, and into the present) much of the traffic was essentially internal, subscribers of the same monopoly telco chatting with each other, so telco capacity was built much more around accommodating local traffic with limited volumes of international calls.
I have no reason to suspect that anything actively prevents an international hop on a domestic call; but would suspect that they are less routine than with internet traffic.
The NSA apparently has a cushy little deal with telco operators in one 6-7 countries, or is managing to run one hell of a hack(and a fairly massive data exfiltration operation) without being noticed…
WRT the technology, there’s a pile of advertising material at
http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles3.html - ctrl-f for audio, speech, speaker etc.
And yes, all those products are praised to scale beautifully.
Ffabian, are you sure about that OR in your question being exclusive?
President Obama has stated that " the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security"
Um, yeah… That’s a lie and it’s a boldfaced lie like we see from criminals like Clapper who despise our US Constitution.
No wonder the bloody internet isn’t wonderbread fast.
President Obama has stated that " the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security" – this is a hard statement to square with the idea of recording all the voice calls made in an entire country
Not really, you just argue that everyone, by virtue of having access to a phone and the internet, is a potential threat to national security. Those tools are enough to cause significant harm if you use them right. The NSA has clearly twisted its collective mind far enough to think that makes sense.
I’m conducting all of my telephone conversations in Pig Latin.
And I thought all those low cost multi-terabyte hard drives were just so I could make my DVD collection more accessible.
Wouldn’t it be something if America could talk the talk and walk the walk? As in, become the world-wide leader in developing technologies that allow for end-to-end encryption and which support privacy in every possible way?
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