KO: AT&T Whistleblower case

[Uben]

The whistleblower who retired from AT&T said the Bush administration copied virtually every internet transaction in the country!
Would that not mean they have copies of the millions of lost emails from Rove's computer? Wonder where they have stuffed them? Wouldn't you love to get your hands on those?

I would be sooooo nice to see them get hung by their own illegal activities!

[MadMaddie]

1. Oh snap...but that would depend on if they had AT&T!

But if it is one of the companies that they used to spy...Could they have fucked themselves on this? Oh I love, "Unintended Consequeces", don't you?:rofl:

[napi21]

3. I don't understand it that way. I've heard several times that because

AT&T OWNS almost
ALL the hard cabeling across the Country, and the other companies have to actually have to RENT use time on those cables, EVERYTHING goes through AT&T at some point!

I also heard him say that the data capture included Google searches, emails, instant messaging, etc.

Now, I do have one very big question about all of this. I realize it was illegal as hell, but just what in the hell could they possible have done with that MASSIVE AMOUNT of data Isn't there SOME point at which te volume is just SO HUGH it's totally unmanageable and useless?????

[MadMaddie]

7. Logically they would store it in some highly secure location

in massive storage databases...

But these guys are so inept and such poor planners it probably never occurred to them the true amount of data that would have to be stored.

But it is a true fact that if AT&T is the main company "MA Bell" reborne...then it's time it is time to break up MA Bell for once and for all....

[jn2375]

2. were the Democrats internet communications also tracked

makes you wonder if they are being blackmailed

[TheWraith]

4. It's not possible to store that much data long term.

Simply put, it would overwhelm any practical storage system within a matter of days or weeks. You’d have to sift through it in real time and store only selected chunks.

To put it in math, AT&T’s internet backbone segments clock in at around 40 gigabits. There’s probably a lot more actual data than that, since they’re talking about a major router where several backbones meet, but let’s take 40 gigabits to keep it simple. That’s 5 GBytes per second. An ordinary desktop hard drive would be filled in 20-40 seconds. A medium-office style storage solution would probably take 3-5 minutes.

Let’s even look at Google’s server farm, one of the largest concentrations of hard drive space in the world, clocking in at around 5,625,000 gigabytes. Even that would only be sufficient to store 13 days of traffic from that 40 Gbit line.

[KittyWampus]

5. Does this all have something to do with Total Information Awareness?

[TheWraith]

6. Shrug.

I seriously doubt that they’re recording more than a tiny sliver of the data that they’d have access to, but the crime is in the fact that they’re doing it extralegally, without a court order, so there’s no way to know. Also the fact that they’re tapping in at this main juncture where they can look at anything coming through, rather than specifically targeting any valid suspects.

The good news is that knowing this administration, their efforts to spy on Americans are probably every bit as ham-handed as their plan to conquer the Middle East was.