How Far Does The National Snooping Dollar Stretch?
from the of-course,-there's-no-accounting-for-classified-funds dept
The surveillance dragnet in the US is undeniably large. As such, lots of money (your money) goes into financing the collection of "relevant" data (your data). We've already seen the generous $100 million surveillance "grant" handed out to telcos in exchange for their "voluntary" cooperation.
The AP has tracked down some of the fees charged by various services for providing the government with data and access. At this point, most of what's being requested probably falls under the heading of "unprecedented," hence the lack of any uniformity in the pricing structure. But even older methods of snooping are subject to some price fluctuations.
AT&T, for example, imposes a $325 "activation fee" for each wiretap and $10 a day to maintain it. Smaller carriers Cricket and U.S. Cellular charge only about $250 per wiretap. But snoop on a Verizon customer? That costs the government $775 for the first month and $500 each month after that, according to industry disclosures made last year to Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass.These fees are rather low when it comes to government expenditures, but this solely covers the less popular method of obtaining information -- old school, targeted wiretaps. Email records are also obtained very cheaply ($25 or less). Part of this surprisingly low cost is automation. In many cases, what the government is requesting is already automatically generated. Another factor is mitigation of the costs of compliance to the company itself.
Online companies in particular tend to undercharge because they don't have established accounting systems, and hiring staff to track costs is more expensive than not charging the government at all, he said.Possibly the greatest factor in keeping the prices low is the oft-maligned court of public opinion. Most of the involved companies would rather not appear to be profiting from selling customer data to the government. That's probably a smart idea, but civil liberties defenders agree that these companies should be charging something, rather than handing out info for free.
"What we don't want is surveillance to become a profit center," said Christopher Soghoian, the ACLU's principal technologist. But "it's always better to charge $1. It creates friction, and it creates transparency" because it generates a paper trail that can be tracked.The individual prices may seem nickel-and-dime, but the government generates enough business for this to turn into real money. AT&T claims to have 100 staffers working around the clock to satisfy government data requests. Verizon claims to have 70. $100 million has already been sent their way, and both companies are extremely unlikely to simply eat these expenses.
Even regular wiretaps can generate significant costs.
The average wiretap is estimated to cost $50,000, a figure that includes reimbursements as well as other operational costs. One narcotics case in New York in 2011 cost the government $2.9 million alone.The costs associated with the FBI's and NSA's large scale surveillance efforts is likely to remain hidden. The FBI claims it's not possible to estimate its outlays as the payments run through a "variety of programs, field offices and case funds."
Anything about the size of NSA's payments to cooperating companies is genuinely impossible to nail down. (At least without a leak...) Its annual budget is classified. All that's known for certain is 15 intelligence agencies share a $75 billion annual budget and estimates place the NSA's share at $10-15 billion.
There's little chance the details of this budget will ever be publicized, which means the public is again asked to trust the "oversight" of those who have access. It's safe to say a large shadow industry has developed over the past 15 years, one that goes beyond simple transactions between intelligence agencies and involved services.
There's also a large number of private security firms being employed by these agencies, many of which have ensured future profitability by setting up shop as close to the Beltway as possible. That's the larger concern: a set of corporations almost totally funded with public money assisting in the capture, analysis and storage of the public's data.
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Filed Under: costs, nsa surveillance, suveillance
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Hmpf.
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fuzzy math
Sounds like a page out of the Hollywood Accounting playbook to me!
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Some people just want to watch the world burn.
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What ever happened to "For The children"? It's all BS huh. Apparently that is only used when it aligns with the narrative, because it seems that we can not afford to feed, cloth or educate children once they are born.
This mindset (assuming they have a mind) is going to bite them in the ass, eventually. I'm amazed they do not see it coming.
1) pay lowest wage possible
2) employees supplement low wage with food stamps
3) remove employee health care
4) no sick days (works well in restaurants - yuk)
5) new hires to replace the fired sick employees
6) remove food stamp program
7) quantity of healthy min workers diminishes
8) have to pay higher wages or go out of business
9) blame the liberals for your self inflicted wounds
-) do not profit
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Food stamps clearly are a burden upon the wealthy job creators and these moochers need to suck it up and get a job fer chyse sake - sheesh! We need government small enough to fit in womens vaginas and yet it keeps getting bigger cause we need to snoop everyones bunghole and invade all other countries. This is all so overly simplistic and intellectually lazy - not sure I can understand it all. Please talk down at me again because I'm sure it makes you feel so much better about yourself.
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"Microsoft, Yahoo and Google won't say how much they charge"
But Google is the SPY AGENCY that profits the most: its tracking and collating is used to charge higher rates to target advertising at us.
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Re: "Microsoft, Yahoo and Google won't say how much they charge"
Google ANNOUNCE what they're being asked to do as and when possible. PLUS, as has been stated over and over again ad nauseam, NOBODY IS OBLIGED TO USE GOOGLE SERVICES, OKAY?
That's why you have no followers here and nobody takes you seriously. The fact that you keep repeating the "Google minions" trope despite all the debunkage serves only to prove that you're an idiot.
And we all know you only post here because your train wreck of a blog gets no attention.
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Re: "Microsoft, Yahoo and Google won't say how much they charge"
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a UK mobile phone company has just announced price changes for PAYG customers. if my memory serves correctly (dont chastise if wrong), prices were going to be dropped to 3p per text, 2p/minute for calls and 1p/meg of data. strange how 1 company can do this, but not all.
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ARTICLE IS LYING
6 figures alone avg wages so lets jsut pretend its about 100K a year
150,000,000,000
UM thats 150 billion TEN TIMES the articles max budget for the nsa
I CALL UTTER FOUL HERE.....
this doesnt inlcude hard ware, the costs of the spying form the isps...etc...
the one NSA AGENT used the word "customer"
so someone is paying 135 billion a year or more for this data?
heatign cost of buildings and other hardware like the storage onto hard drives IS ALSO A HUGE COST....
again this cant be true article estimates are on a lowside of 175 billion to as high as 250 billion for hte nsa alone.
this does not include the cia, the fbi, or the DHS
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Re: ARTICLE IS LYING
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data encryption onto harddrive costs
2.6 billion people on the net if the nsa reach is even half that
1.3 billion people and lets jsut pretend that 10% are using encryption methods
130 million people ( we know 500 million calls a year alone from germany and that they also do russia )
so lets say each of the above 130 million make about 100 hrs of calls a month
600 megabyte times 100 or 60 GB per caller
20 callers per terabyte
2 tb drive = say 100$
so 40 callers per 100$
130 MILLION / 40
3,250,000 hard drives times 100$
32.5 billion a year on a guestimate for hard drives alone to store as they say anyone using encryption.
50% of all pirates use a form of encryption so you prolly can increase that 130 million as most nations say about 20-30% of there nation does stuff
2.6 billion times 30%
720-750 million half that is around 300+ million
so think this is prolly a low ball....and remember they spent almost 2 billion on a facility to house this stuff...
for all that storage...
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Re: data encryption onto harddrive costs
Not necessarily. It entirely depends on the sampling rate and bit width being used. For example, ordinary phone service is digitized at 8K. One hour of uncompressed POTS audio would be a bit less than 28 megs. Also, who in the world would store this uncompressed?
I think your estimates of required storage are highly inflated.
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Re: Re: data encryption onto harddrive costs
Ack, I meant 29 megs.
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Am I allowed to use that excuse when the IRS wants to know how much money I need to pay taxes on?
I'm sorry. I cannot tell you how much money I made last year because I was paid through a variety of programs, offices, and funds. I'll just pay taxes on the income from my primary employer.
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@13
they cant lock you all up cause if they dont get any taxes they get NO MONEY....
put some tea in a barrel and brign that with you....and have everyone meet at boston harbour
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outlook ( SEE news about miscrosoft bending over )
perhaps yahoo...( opps nope they bend it too )
so what exactly your saying is fuck you lady you have no choice go away and pretend nohting is going on , and whne the nsa has an issue with you well fuck you....
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meh secret court of love( part 4)
Agent 002: "Hey ain't hollystupid trying ot mess with pirates, lets SELL them data on everyone...teehee"
{CASH REGISTER SOUNDS}
Agent 001: "Hey i know some CEO's would love this , lets make them pay too"
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'Well, it looks like we'll be trimming the budget you get this year, we only allocate funding for known expenses, and as you are unable to provide evidence as to where exactly the money provided to you is going, we can only assume it's being wasted, and will therefor be decreasing the amount allocated to you.'
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How to blow through billions stupidly.
I may be minimizing the magnitude of the job, but I'm sure pretty much any Unix/Linux Procmail user could replace those 170 clerks with a short recipe that searched a data file for the addressees in each incoming email, then forwards each hit off to the TLAs automatically, 24*7*365.25.
As for wiretaps, once you hook a sound activated recorder onto the line, you then need one person to sit and listen to and classify the contents of each call, and then what? Okay, watch the number the call comes from and based on calling number, some will be interesting and others can be automatically discounted. That costs millions of dollars, how?
I know the military is known for hundred dollar hammers and thousand dollar toilets. What's AT&T's and Verizon's excuse? This sounds incredibly ad hoc, wing it, didn't put *any* thought into it before just doing whatever some wingnut non-technical manager said to do.
I must be missing something important ... Or these people are getting away with highway robbery and shipping boatloads of cash off to the Caymans.
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