<story><title>Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?</title><url>http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephone-calls-recorded-fbi-boston</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>acabal</author><text>I&apos;ve said it before and I&apos;ll say it again: anonymity online and encrypted communications are one of the most important problems we&apos;re going to going to face in the coming decades.  Hackers should be working on those, not clever ways to serve ads or geolocating your latest locally-sourced coffee.&lt;p&gt;If you don&apos;t believe the US is already permanently archiving vast swaths of communication, it&apos;s not a big leap of imagination to picture it happening in five or ten years.  Likewise the government might not have the computer power to &lt;i&gt;analyze&lt;/i&gt; those archives &lt;i&gt;today&lt;/i&gt;, but in five or ten years, I&apos;d bet on it.&lt;p&gt;Some people don&apos;t mind that the government stores their emails.  &quot;I&apos;m fine with it because I know they&apos;re going to catch the bad guys&quot; or &quot;I&apos;m fine with it because I have nothing to hide&quot;.  Those are certainly powerful (though flawed) arguments for the situation &lt;i&gt;today&lt;/i&gt;.  Those people are perhaps picturing filing cabinets in some dank warehouse filled with paper printouts of their emails, which due to space constraints will be shredded or forgotten in ten years.  The reality is that thanks to technology, what we say today is being stored and archived &lt;i&gt;for-ev-er&lt;/i&gt; and can be indexed and retrieved &lt;i&gt;easily and indefinitely&lt;/i&gt;.  Why does that make a difference?  Because &lt;i&gt;today&lt;/i&gt;, what you say and do might be lawful.  But laws and societies change over time, and the government will still be able to go back and dig up what you said decades ago and use it against you.&lt;p&gt;That&apos;s really what scares me--because today, I, like most people, don&apos;t have much to hide.  But who knows what laws or culture will be like in 20 years, and what can be used against me that I said so very long ago?  Can you imagine working at the WTC and having a bad day, and jokingly sending an email to a coworker about bombing the place because you&apos;re so mad.  9/11 happens a year later, the government looks in its archives for the email you sent, and in a post-9/11 frenzy sends you to Guantanamo to &quot;await trial&quot;.  Or it doesn&apos;t even have to go that far; some government spokesperson lets your name slip in an interview as a &quot;suspect&quot; and the media attention you&apos;ll get will forever ruin your life even if the government does nothing.</text></comment>
<story><title>Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?</title><url>http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/04/telephone-calls-recorded-fbi-boston</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danbruc</author><text>The first question that comes to my mind - is this technically and economically possible?&lt;p&gt;How many minutes does the average person spend on the phone per day? I found some numbers in the range from 6 to 28 minutes per day. Let&apos;s just pick 15 minutes. This times the population of the states (313.9 million) divided by two yields 39,237,500 hours per day. Storing this at 8 kbps requires about 128.5 TiB per day or 45.8 PiB per year.&lt;p&gt;At $40 per TiB this is less than 2 million dollars per year. So technically and economically this should actually be possible. But that is just storing. Performing speech recognition, analyzing the data and extracting information is probably the much harder task and I would guess that it is still infeasible to do this with all phone calls.</text></comment>