We found out that Verizon -- just Verizon -- was handing over "phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily" in June 2013.
500M might be an official number that they're willing to release but (without any way to prove it, obviously) I'm certain that the REAL number is much, much higher.
For an organization who has vowed to "collect it all", it just doesn't seem likely that the NSA voluntarily went from "an estimated billions of records collected per day" to just 500M per year.
Or perhaps it's just 500M according to their own made up definition of "collect"?
>Or perhaps it's just 500M according to their own made up definition of "collect"?
This sounds like it's much closer to the truth. "It's not a collection until it comes up as a result in a search" would be about on par with the nonsense the NSA was claiming about what was considered searching data on American Citizens.
Indeed. That was Clapper's cover for his perjury in front of Congress: "collected" records are labeled as such only after they are "returned as part of queries" -- which is not what people usually think "collected" means. Any normal person would consider all records potentially subject to queries have already been "collected" for that end, and should be counted as such.
If I started "collecting" stolen credit card numbers as a hobby, but not using them, did I collect any numbers? What if I only put them in a database and never run a select? I doubt that defense would hold up. I hate word games.
> The 2017 call records tally remained far less than an estimated billions of records collected per day under the NSA’s old bulk surveillance system, which was exposed by former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden in 2013.
After learning of their liberal use of the English language and how they have "re-defined" common words to suit their agenda, I believe very little of anything they say.
The definitions you're thinking of came from conspiracy theory blogs in the aftermath of the Snowden leaks, which proliferated because the numbers didn't add up when taken together with Greenwald's mistaken assertion that PRISM is a full-take program.
The real question is what fraction of these calls had both parties inside the US. That's a different category than when one party is external/foreign — that's domestic espionage, which is a violation of law unless pre-authorized by the FISA court. THAT's the number I'd most like to know.
We found out that Verizon -- just Verizon -- was handing over "phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily" in June 2013.
500M might be an official number that they're willing to release but (without any way to prove it, obviously) I'm certain that the REAL number is much, much higher.
For an organization who has vowed to "collect it all", it just doesn't seem likely that the NSA voluntarily went from "an estimated billions of records collected per day" to just 500M per year.
Or perhaps it's just 500M according to their own made up definition of "collect"?