Explain this to me: How would they use your telephone number??

[kentuck]

A number by itself, it seems to me, is worthless. There has to be more information for the number to have any value. They must have a name or a location, at the minimum.

But, the story being put out is that they are only "mining" numbers. What does that mean? How do they use those numbers? Of what value are the numbers without more information? Please explain.

[texastoast]

1. Hmm

"the story being put out is that they are only 'mining' numbers"

Could they be

LYING??????

[Waya]

2. They're sprouting bullsh*t again......

a 'number only' wouldn't be of any use at all.....

[liberal N proud]

3. They could be holding the number until the want more from the caller

From the number it is not difficult to tie that number to a phone customer, then what from there, who knows.

[SaveElmer]

4. Well I doubt it is only numbers...

But they can detect calling patterns...say you were calling numbers of people they didn't like...numbers by themselves can be valuable...

But I highly doubt it ended there...

[wakeme2008]

5. Puter geek here NOTHING worth wild

I have worked for smaller Telcos and you can not believe the size of the database just the call data take up. Billions of calls per WEEK are made in the US. OK once you got a couple years worth of data what can you do with it .. Search it :rofl: You got to be high.....

[ieoeja]

20. That's what super computers are for.

You don't run accounting systems on those things. You don't even need a supercomputer to add up the Republican deficit.

[KurtNYC]

23. Telcos sell mailing lists - they profile consumers based on who

they call.

As a marketer you can mail to these lists (though you never get the actual list, you pay by the number of names). You can fliter the data by things like do they call:
- HSN or other home shopping entities
- AARP
- Dominos pizza delivery (competitors can mail coupons)
etc.

Here is a mailing list broker that will sell lists of people with certain medical ailments (among other things)
http://www.americadirectmail.com/

[ixion]

6. whenever you buy something with a credit card, your phone number

can ultimately be tied to the purchase.

But that's only the beginning. Given a phone number, they can build a complete profile of where you shopped, what you bought, how much you withdrew from the bank, if you went to a doctor (or psychiatrist) and so on.

That's what they can do with your phone number, and a whole bunch of complicit corporations.

[realisticphish]

7. the info lies

in which numbers call which other numbers. I.e., (so they say) if a terrorist suspect calls you, you become a suspect as well

[kentuck]

9. If they know the phone numbers of "terrorists"....?

Why don't they capture them or arrest them??

[realisticphish]

10. bah

such logic is the kind of thing that makes you a terrorist suspect :evilgrin:

[skids]

28. Maybe they did, or maybe they will.

The list goes back a long time. In some cases they don't arrest terrorists for a while because they want to follow them and see if they will lead them to more terrorists. In some cases, if a terrorist were arrested, they would go back in the data to find out who else might be a terrorist. Or a peace activist.

[onenote]

8. here's my guess at how they'd explain it

They'll say that they need the information so that when, through other intelligence gathering channels (such as international call wiretaps), they identify a "suspect" they can then run that person's number through the database of past calls to see if there are patterns of calls to/from/involving that number as a way of trying to identify other "cell" members.

Just my guess.

onenote

[HereSince1628]

11. All the data slugs sent have routing information attached

that ultimately makes it possible to know the "to" and "from" involved in each call.

Once you know that information you can build networks of "cells," hierarchies within and between cells, activity patterns of the cells, etc.

[kentuck]

12. Out of 200 million calls monitored..?

How many cells have they busted?

[HereSince1628]

18. Unknown by me, but then they wouldn't tell me and I wouldn't believe them

if they did.

So much importance is put on stopping "the next 9/11" that it's not the number of cells detected that is important. Working on finding that one rationalizes all the effort and expense they throw at it.

And if in the process that facilitates all sorts of FBI, DEA, INS and other investigatory services well, ain't that just grand? With no credible oversight possible, they could be doing ANYTHING with this data.

[BR_Parkway]

25. They sure as hell WOULD tell - it'd be on FAUX news 24/7 - they have

no good news in Iraq, Iran, the rest of the world to report - here at home every domestic program is turning to shit. If they even arrested a "terrorist" you can bet they'd be on every TV in America pumping the whole "we'll keep you safer than the Democrats" meme.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see some folks rounded up very shortly simply to take the pressure off ShrubCO. Who'll notice if they don't get convicted AFTER the '06 elections, but they sure as hell need to bust a "terror cell" now to break the bad news cycle.

[HereSince1628]

27. I really don't think so. In the intelligence game you exploit

the knowledge you have and that means monitoring rather than publically revealling known threats. Destroying a cell before it is "ripe" wastes all the effort.

We will behave just like in the UK when they knew 2 of last years bombers and yet didn't jump in to arrest them.

[Karmakaze]

13. First of all, they are not only mining numbers...

They do of course know who those numbers belong to - a reverse directory lookup will give that to them.

But what they are really mining is who you call, and who they call, and who they call. Say for example that you ring me. Now they know you and I have a relationship of some kind. If you ring me more than once, they know it is not a passing relationship. If you ring me frequently or in some kind of pattern, say every Tuesday, they can surmise that there is more than just a casual relationship, and if it is very regular (as in same time each week) then they can guess there is some kind of organisation to our relationship, rather than just say friendship.

Now they do the same to me and see who I ring. Now imagine I ring a number, the same number, minutes after you rang me. Now there is a chain forming. By studying such chains and comparing them with known targets, they can discern patterns of behaviour.

You have heard them talk about how they detect a threat by the "chatter" well this is it. It's called signals intelligence. You can tell a whole lot about what is going on by simply finding out who calls who, when. You don't even have to know what was actually said, yet from the patterns you can detect things you wouldn't think possible without actually knowing what was said.

For example you and I have a regular call. Once a week for months. Suddenly there are a flurry of calls in one week then silence. You could surmise from this that something was being planned. When the flurry occurs the final preperations are underway, and when the calls stop the plan is being put into action. Now if it was a woman calling her parents this could mean a marriage. But if it was apparent strangers, who have no other common feature, then perhaps it is a terrorist plot.

Now imagine someone I called, called someone who was a known terrorist. Now you have a whole network of people identified as being in regular contact with a terrorist because they were in contact with me. That would include YOU, and you have now just joined the ranks of terrorist suspects. Now everyone who has called YOU regularly is ALSO a terrorist suspect, and so on.

All that from just a number.

[shain from kane]

22. So the biggest terrorists out there are these automatic computer

dialing services. Can you imagine their networks and the connections that can be determined from their patterns? But those statistics could be affected by no call lists and caller ID options. How could any meaningful information be mined from such a hugh complicated universe? Most of the examples given assumed some narrowness through suggested parameters, but the entire universe needs to be defined, and each time it is narrowed all participants must fully understand the new definition with its inclusions and exclusions. Until someone can show any meaningful conclusion from this mess, I will assume that the entire effort will end in failure.

[skids]

26. That was a simplification...

It's actually fairly complex analysis using some very sophisticated algorithms, which as mentioned take into account the to, the from, the time of the call, and probably the general location in order to include pay-phones and such into the mix. They probably build a profile pattern of known-good targets from the data, and then search the data for places where similar unique facets occur in other people's patterns, and then back it up with some legwork.

Here is where the danger comes in: if the NSAs results are ever shared to a less competent agency, or the NSA itself becomes less competent due to cronyism, they will end up with many "false positives" in the results, and they will further handle those false positives badly, by doing stuff like freezing the bank accounts of a "suspicious" individual and otherwise harassing citizens. We've seen the DHS do this just based on really badly thought out heuristics (e.g. the nuns that had their convent account frozen because it had no name of record, and the folks who got their's frozen because they tried to pay off the rest of their mortgage in a big chunk.)

If the NSA goes the way of the DHS, that will be a very bad thing. People will be disappeared off the streets to undergo days of questioning for really stupid misfires.

And that's just considering the angle that the NSA is honestly looking for terrorists and not just any political opponent...

[Karmakaze]

30. Not at all...

in fact the more data you can get, the more accurate the picture. By mining every telephone call, patterns that would not necessarily show up with only a few monitored people, WILL show up. Nothing can be missed, simply because it is all automated with simple rules.

Pulling patterns out of such data is no harder than breaking complex encryption routines, and the NSA does that ALL THE TIME. Thats why they have the greatest concentration of supercomputers in the world. It would simply be a matter of simple rule sets designed to extract relationships. You don't target a specific number, you target a specific pattern, and then extract all numbers that fit that pattern.

In my examples I was describing what a pattern may look like, but that would not mean they would look at my number and wait for such patterns. They would simple look at ALL numbers and extract those that fit the patterns of interest. Say for example a payphone gets used to make a call to a local number on a regular basis. Is that a terrorist? A drug dealer? Or a cheating husband? The pattern is suspicious but not necessarily the people involved. BUT someone might like knowing that a husband is cheating on his wife. That might be useful leverage in a negotiation for example.

This is nothing new. Signals Intelligence agencies have been doing this for decades. For example Soviet radio traffic was monitored in this way. Even when the content of the message was encypted, just knowing who sent it when and to whom, told US intelligence something about what was going on. If a certain call pattern developed and was followed by a military excercise, they would be able to tell what calls would be made during a mobilisation of Soviet forces.

If you see that same pattern again, you know that the Soviets are mobilising, and if nothing is going on at the time you might conclude it is just another excercise - but if the US and Soviets are arguing about something and tensions are high, you might think it is the prelude to war.

Once again all this without knowing what was actually said.

So the technique is nothing new, and will probably find interesting patterns. But then so would actually listening in. Its not what they are doing technically that is the problem, it is the intention behind it - they are spying on EVERYONE. No matter what the method, they are assuming everyone is a suspect and spying on them all the time, not even until proved otherwise. You may not be a terrorist now, but what about in a months time? So the effort will NEVER end. That is the whole point. Sure maybe in a decade they might find an actual terrorist cell, but in the meantime they have mined an awful lot of useful data about everyone else.

The funny thing about statistics, the bigger the data set, the more accurate the results. So it is preferable by far to mine as many calls as possible for as long as possible. With sufficient computing power, very accurate result WILL be forthcoming. And the NSA has ENORMOUS amounts of computing power that can be brought to bear.

On edit: Forgot to point out that simply recording the content of every call would be a waste of computing power. You dont want to analyse the content of every call made, what you want to do is figure out which calls may be important and which ones can be ignored - THEN you look at the content of those calls. So after a pattern is founf that is suspicous, that can be used to take it to the next level of actively tapping the calls.

[Dunvegan]

14. It's not just call records...the NSA is also tapping into Internet fiber

It's Not Just Call Data Records: Some Telcos Let the NSA Tap Into Fiber Using Narus BlackBoxes.

An information security expert, Bruce Schneier, talks about observations leading to this probability that the NSA is tapping directly into Internet backbone fiber.

This means with a Narus blackbox the NSA can sit on Internet fiber and monitor 10 billion bits of data per second.

This also means they can (according to the Narus founder) "see the 'semantics' of network traffic, service providers can see 'inside' the data, providing much more detailed insight about the use of the Internet...and consistently capture and analyze all IP data streams on heavily trafficked networks remotely and non-invasively."

More about what the Narus box can do HERE at DailyKos.

More info about Narus HERE.

You can show them some love by e-mailing Narus here: [e-mail]
Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]

Schneier on Security
April 14, 2006
AT&T Assisting NSA Surveillance

Interesting details emerging from EFF's lawsuit

According to a statement released by Klein's attorney, an NSA agent showed up at the San Francisco switching center in 2002 to interview a management-level technician for a special job. In January 2003, Klein observed a new room being built adjacent to the room housing AT&T's #4ESS switching equipment, which is responsible for routing long distance and international calls.

"I learned that the person whom the NSA interviewed for the secret job was the person working to install equipment in this room," Klein wrote. "The regular technician work force was not allowed in the room." Klein's job eventually included connecting internet circuits to a splitting cabinet that led to the secret room. During the course of that work, he learned from a co-worker that similar cabinets were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.

"While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the Worldnet (AT&T's internet service) circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal," Klein wrote. The split circuits included traffic from peering links connecting to other internet backbone providers, meaning that AT&T was also diverting traffic routed from its network to or from other domestic and international providers, according to Klein's statement.

The secret room also included data-mining equipment called a Narus STA 6400, "known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets," according to Klein's statement.

[shain from kane]

15. More than one person can use a phone. Do they have

a collection of voiceprints that they match with all phone conversations? What about telephone booths at other locations? No crimes are ever arranged using those types of communication? And the dial-up internet where no actual voice communication is used?
If they are missing one telephone conversation, then their statistical house of cards will collapse, because their universe has not been properly defined. And if they say that one telephone conversation would not make any appreciable difference, then it can be answered at that point that if that is the case, then ANY one telephone conversation should not make any appreciable difference.

[Sparkly]

16. It's very easy to get the rest of the info. nt

[paparush]

17. There are tons of websites that let you Reverse Lookup on Phone Numbers

Find names, addresses, etc..

crossreference these with lists of groups, committees, etc, and you've got a handy way to monitor people's activities and draw conclusions...

So, if Joe 6-Pack can do it in a small scale way online, imagine what the frigging NSA can do...

[Dunvegan]

21. NSA has very up-to-date reverse lookup capiblity.

It's virtually built-in to their analysis ability.

[Dunvegan]

19. The NSA Uses the Call Records to conduct "Social Network Analysis"

NSA has been in love with social network analysis for a long time now.

Here's a representational chart of the social analysis of the relationships (with names removed) of the pilots of the flights of 911:



They also do this sort of analysis with individuals looking for links among terrorists.

If a friend's cousin's friend shows up on one of their charts via a terrorist watch list (or someone, like the screwy no-fly lists, has the same name as the friend's cousins friend and is on a terrorist watch list) there's a outside chance you could be netted.

That's why I don't like the call records being handed over without oversight.

I'm more concerned with real NSA error than some overblown fear of terror.

[BR_Parkway]

24. Way more than you'd like to think - check out this link:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2621490

[CornField]

29. The most effective use of a database is with other databases

Maybe like those ChoicePoint has already provided to the government...

[PurityOfEssence]

31. Say you call a friend who gets convicted

You now associate with known criminals. If they have connections to "terrorism", you can be picked up and held indefinitely, just like Jose Padilla.

Tom DeLay used homeland security resources to track the plane flight of Texas legislators when they fled to Oklahoma to deny a quorum for a vote to redistrict. What does that have to do with Homeland Security? If you think these fucks won't use any information they gain to do whatever they please, you're beyond naive.

By knowing what phone numbers you call, they know who you're talking with and can make inferences about your behavior. They can claim that you consort with known pornographers and use this against you for employment reasons. If you call about drug or alcohol counseling, they can tar you as an alcoholic or a junkie and use this against you with employers or potential employers. If you call a phone sex line, you can be tarred as a pervert.

People make mistakes, so even if you call someone innocuous, they can get it wrong.

Once the information is compiled, it's there for anyone to get his/her hands on who can. Who knows who will steal this information? It can also aid in identity theft.

What value are "mere" numbers? The government can find out quite easily who is at these numbers, and by inference, YOU are a fellow-traveler with this person. How do you know that someone with whom you do business isn't a child molester? If you call this person, it would be "true" that you consort with pedophiles.

Society is built on the premise that WE DON'T TRUST EACH OTHER. That's the point of law: to keep each other in line. We didn't band together as a species to save ourselves from the wild animals outside, we banded together to keep each other from getting out of line. One interpretation of this is to delve into the business of others and demand strict compliance; that's a police state. The other interpretation is to allow people privacy and only clamp down on them when they intrude upon others.

As Pete Stark said to Denny Hastert (literally turning around to address him to his face) after giving a speech against the IWR vote on the House floor: "...the bottom line, Mr. Speaker, is that I do not trust this President and I do not trust his advisers."

What's in a number? More than you know.

[texastoast]

32. Excellent points

I was listening this morning about the same thing about the nation's DNA database (about 3,000,000 records and growing). In trying to match DNA from a crime scene, investigators are getting "fuzzy matches" from the database, which indicate that a relative of the database match is the likely perp.

The piece cited a situation where a 14-year-old boy who was "stopped" for a traffic violation ended up having his DNA put into the database, and years later, his DNA fuzzy matched evidence at a crime scene, so they started hunting down his relatives.

[texastoast]

33. Kick

:kick: