FYI - Federal government wiretaps do not cause clicks on your line!

Shitty phone service does that.

The government taps calls when they are still digital data streams in the central office or other part of the switching network, and this is totally undetectable.

It is still possible that STATE government uses analog taps, but I doubt it.

actually, I always kinda wondered about those clicks.

you'd never know.

And like you say, if the line is tapped when it's in a multiplexed 'virtual' data stream, there is no 'physical' connection to interfere with the quality of the call.

without you ever being aware of it that it is scary. When my brother was in the Army, he needed some sort of security clearance, and in the process of obtaining it, the FBI visited my mother and me. It was back in the '60s, and the agent told us where we went on vacation the last couple of years, where we went to church, how we spent our time. They obtained all this legally, I suppose (I was quite young at the time). But the amount of information obtained gave me pause then, and gives me pause now, because it showed me how important it was to limit when information could be obtained. If Bush is given carte blanche, everything about everyone will be known, and the information can be used the way he wants it used--not based on the rule of law, but the rule of the lawless.

and also in the 60s. It is amazing what they can find out.

they even knew that our grandparents both spoke German. But, they also knew they had ceased doing so (even in their home) in the mid-30s in the run up to WWII.

They also knew that a deceased grandmother (died in 1945) was Jehovah Witness.

Its more like a credit check than it is dragnet.

People really have no idea how vuneralbe they are to toal giveaway of every single bit of their lives.

No shit, I was thinking about this last night. The only thing about me that is not discernable from public records or could not be got with taps very easily would be intimate conversations I have had with my wife. And in fact many of them would not have been safe.

I doubt that most of the conversations are actually listened to by a human ear, imagine the millions of daily international telephone calls, digitized or not, in multiple languages...the NSA is big but it doesn't employ half the nation...


If there telephone surveillance approached anything like the RF surveillance I was involved with, the NSA is intially mostly interested in the routing info so they can detect potential clusters of people calling each other. The amount of captured data quickly becomes a problem of excessive abundance.

Once the know who they are most interested in would get intense about the level of resources they commit to the content.

their dragnet means that they have to sort through tons and tons and tons of stuff that isn't helpful to what they are trying to find out-and it just means that resources must be stretched thin. It would seem to me that it is likely that conversations that might lead to something would be spoken in code with words that wouldn't raise red flags anyway and that these conversations would be passed over. I also wonder how many people working at NSA have been using their time to listen in to conversations not invovled with terrorism, but with politics or sex or whatever that particular person is interested in. Remember please the police helicopter in NYC that was supposed to film a bicycle protest (yeah, gotta watch out for bike terrorists) and wound up filming a couple having sex on a rooftop.

and yes they undoubtedly collect a lot of background traffic in order to get the data they want.

The timing and volume of the calls within a network are often suggestive of the structure of the cluster and its activity.

Imagine, for example, 8 telephone numbers regualarly calling one phone number...doesn't that suggest to you that the one getting all the calls is more centrally located in the cluster, if not a control center for the cluster at least a communication hub. Command centers might be noticed because they initiate calls that radiate sequentially into the web of the cluster.

Changes in the volume of traffic can indicate activity in the cell. That's the increased "chatter" crap Cheney and Ridge talked about everytime they popped another elevation of alert status.

wouldn't it be plausible that the cell leader would simply keep changing phones so that they couldn't be detected? The new number could be given via code.

And isn't it possible that perfectly innocent people who are called a lot could become a target? I'm thinking in my case of Sufi teachers, whose students may be all over the world. They communicate via telephone and email quite a lot.

They also laugh and giggle in the background when I'm on the phone! Stay out of my love life FBI! :tinfoilhat: :crazy: :tinfoilhat:

:scared: