"They have a capacity to listen to every overseas phone call"

[kpete]

Spy net may pull in all U.S. calls overseas
Many Americans' privacy is at risk, some say

By CHARLIE SAVAGE
THE BOSTON GLOBE

WASHINGTON -- The National Security Agency, in carrying out President Bush's order to intercept the international phone calls and e-mails of Americans suspected of links to al-Qaida, has probably been using computers to monitor all other Americans' international communications as well, according to specialists familiar with the workings of the NSA.

The Bush administration formally defended its domestic spying program in a letter to Congress late Thursday, saying the nation's security outweighs privacy concerns of individuals who are monitored.

"They have a capacity to listen to every overseas phone call," said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which has obtained documents about the NSA's using Freedom of Information Act requests.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/253223_spying23.html?dpfrom=thead

[DS1]

1. Not exactly

They can record every overseas call, but as it's been pointed out by numerous people, it would take years to actually go through everything.

[terip64]

2. They still have the capacity

[mrcheerful]

3. Not if they use warning words and

a computer. Then all they have to read is the ones that set off red lights.Which is how prisons keep an eye on criminals. They monitor ever piece of mail and every phone call a prisoner makes, they look for key words to stop mail or start investigating a phone call a prisoner makes that set off warnings.

[DS1]

4. so, I send off a guy on a mission

but I tell him, in person, that ( insert naughty keyword here ) is going to be referred as cupcake

[Viva_La_Revolution]

6. So we should be treated as criminals?

I'm OK with monitoring prisoners calls, they are in prison for a reason.
What have we (American Citizens) done to lose our freedoms? What crime have we committed that makes it OK? Oh yea, we're letting * run our country.

[mrcheerful]

9. I was explaining how wiretaps work

thats what they do when they wiretap, listen for warning words. Where does it say I support what shrubs doing?

[ThomWV]

5. Not Really

Even your cellphone has voice recognition software in it these days.

Also, things can be collected and stored in more ways than one and the way you store something often determines how you will be able to retreive from it. And I'm not going to say anything else.

[DS1]

8. That doesn't address my point

My point was that while they CAN record every overseas call, it takes much more time to figure out what's valuable.

[SOteric]

11. So,

saying they're capable of collecting the data is a far cry from actually finding the time and personnel to sift it into Intelligence.

[rodeodance]

7. the capacity if there--but should they listen in is the question.

[rman]

10. Keeping track of phone connections is (can be) done automatically,

detecting patterns in those connections is (can be) done automatically.

This is how they come up with 'chatter alerts'.

In so far that phone calls (and emails, faxes etc) are recorded, the contents can be analyzed automatically to a large extend. That includes making links to other info about the people that are being 'wire tapped', ie what books you borrow from the library, or what books your family members borrow from the library.

At some point humans will judge what the system comes up with - but the bulk of the work is not done (doesn't have to be done) by manual labor.
The technology is all there, it's just that to do this on a massive scale takes a lot of money - of which they have no short supply.



Of course such a system will come up with a lot of false positives. But the neocon gang in power prefers to be safe rather then sorry, and takes that paradigm to an extreme.
Per Ashcroft: "...waiting for the commission of a crime, or waiting for there to be evidence of the commission of a crime, didn't seem to us to be the appropriate way to protect the American people".
See "The Power of Nightmares" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/3755686.stm