They have had this technology for a long time. My friend's parents owned an electronics store and they had a device to listen in on cell phone conversations. They never used it and they stored it in a closet under a bunch of junk but they had it. I am torn on this debate though. Personally I could care less if anyone is listening to my calls since there is a 99.999% chance I am not doing or saying anything illegal. I also think that if someone is caught doing something majorly illegal then I could care less how they got their information. I can, however, see how it can be classified as an invasion of privacy and piss people off. I do wonder if they used this technology to uncover a plot to kill (lets say everyone on the boards family), would you care how they got that information? Personally I would be mad as hell if a judge threw the case out because of how the authorities found out this person was a bad person.
MD Police under Fire for using Anti-Terrorism device to track sandwich thief
- Thread starter Misfit
- Start date
They have had this technology for a long time. My friend's parents owned an electronics store and they had a device to listen in on cell phone conversations. They never used it and they stored it in a closet under a bunch of junk but they had it. I am torn on this debate though. Personally I could care less if anyone is listening to my calls since there is a 99.999% chance I am not doing or saying anything illegal. I also think that if someone is caught doing something majorly illegal then I could care less how they got their information. I can, however, see how it can be classified as an invasion of privacy and piss people off. I do wonder if they used this technology to uncover a plot to kill (lets say everyone on the boards family), would you care how they got that information? Personally I would be mad as hell if a judge threw the case out because of how the authorities found out this person was a bad person.
Clem72
Well-Known Member
What they almost certainly had was a scanner that had been modified to allow the channels used by cordless phones (800/900mhz mostly).
Had a nice Bearcat myself, used to be fun to mess with taco bell drive through customers at night.
glhs837
Power with Control
So, recording all your phone calls forever is fine just in case? My point has never been against using the tech, it's the lack of oversight and over collection of innocents data that bothers me. Plug suspects number in, locate it, nab bad guy, go home, have a frosty one. Good. Willy nilly query every cell phone in the building, collect that data, drop it over to the NSA, just in case they might want to look back at all of the data, not cool. That's Stasi crap and I'm willing to run more risk to not live in a country where every citizen is a suspect to be surveilled "just in case".
True, I would like to think they have a reason to be listening in on a conversation. If they mistakenly think I am a suspect and monitor my conversations they would be awfully disappointed and probably a little bored.
glhs837
Power with Control
Well, listening is sort an outdated concept. We are talking about raw information. Numbers called, length of calls, gps location of call. And you might like to think they only get and store that data n people of interest. The problem is they do it for all the people, in case you become of interest later
Hank
my war
there are reportedly 6.8 BILLION cell phone subscriptions in the world, NSA has about 20K employees, that's a lot of listening,
Voice recognition software "listens" for certain words and they can target regions and other filters to mine more precisely.
They are finding that local law enforcement is using the No Fly List as a tool. Which is why there is reluctance to use it to process gun permits.
Chris0nllyn
Well-Known Member
there are reportedly 6.8 BILLION cell phone subscriptions in the world, NSA has about 20K employees, that's a lot of listening,
The stingray is used by local police.
The NSA collects metadata. Enough so that they built a 1 million sq. ft. data center in Utah. 100,000 sq ft of which is a data center that houses the Cray XC30 supercomputer which can do about 100,000 trillion calculations every second.
http://www.cray.com/Assets/PDF/products/xc/CrayXC30Brochure.pdf
It's pretty sweet.
We watch stuff on tv like the show, Person of Interest and dismiss it as a fraud, yet it's here today. Massive Super Computer (beyond super computer, probably more computing power than all the computers in the DoD combine), connected to all sorts of data gathering systems, cameras, license plate readers, cell phone interceptions (which is also locations, contacts etc.). With the computational power to link that data to a user, and then link users to form associations. Fact is, they don't know who is a criminal or who is a terrorist until something triggers the software or there is an event. But the data sets are ready.
Since they already own your social security number, they have all your financial records. Have to scan those for transactions of interest.
But don't worry, they are hack proof.