How the United States spies on us all

John Kawakami johnk at cyberjava.com
Thu Jan 7 21:48:57 PST 1999


Uh, yeah, maybe.

One cheap PC can monitor one day's worth of phone calls. Let's say I make 1 hour of calls a day, and there's a computer to record all these to disk. I'd say one PC can record at least six simultanous conversations. So, in a day, it can record the conversations of 144 people. Let's say 70 people, because there are more calls during the day than at 3 AM.

Put another computer on the job, and you can scan those recordings for key words, like "hash" or "got the stuff" or "beat up". You can monitor conversations in real-time these days. I'll assume that PC can handle the full load, working 24 hours a day. This computer is responsible for flagging potentially important messages and copying them for a monitoring employee.

Let's say that there are N interesting messages flagged per day, per 70 people. Assume messages are 5 minutes long, or 12 messages per person per day.

One agent, working 8 hours monitoring people, can monitor 72 messages.

That works out to (72/N)*70 people. If N (the number of interesting phone calls per 70 people) is 1, that's around 500 people per agent. If N is 10, that's 50 people per agent.

20 - 200 agents could monitor a pool of 10,000 people.

So, if you are among the 10,000 interesting people in any given city, you might already be watched.

I have started frequenting some of the goth clubs around LA, and noticed that the same crowd shows up at each club. There's nothing strange here, except there are millions of people in LA. The goth scene in LA might only be a thousand strong. Maybe it's only several thousand fans. Maybe it's 20 thousand. Regardless, it's small. This entire group, which constitutes an important node in the goth lifestyle network, because they're located near Cleopatra Records and other important death rock "things", could be monitored by a small number of people.

More to the point, consider that gangs are monitored by the police. In LA, to some extent, the police are an active appendage to the ever shifting gang scene. They manage to keep track of gang activity and still perform some of their other social functions. They use databases and tracking software. Using information technology, each officer's surveillance powers are extended. Increasingly, affiliation with gangs or gang members will single you out to the police.

The infrastructure for mass surveillance is being built.

At 01:39 PM 1/7/99 -0800, you wrote:
>> Hey, when you're the NSA, you don't have to sub to a list to read its
>> traffic. And this message isn't even about terrorism.
>>
>> Years ago, a friend of a friend of mine who made a film about surveillance
>> for HBO told me that the NSA's computers are programmed to tap any phone
>> conversation containing the word "Israel." I bet they do the same for
>> emails containing the word Saddam now too. Wonder how many spelling
>> variants of the Libyan leader's name they recognize?
>>
>
>But where do they have huge rooms of people sitting around listening to
>conversations and reading people's boring email in search of anything
>useful. In East Germany, there was a whole large employment category of
>workers whose job was to guard or spy on other people - does the NSA and
>FBI etc. have thousands of employees?
>
>

John Kawakami johnk at cyberjava.com http://www.riceball.com/ethnoveg - the ethnic studies + vegetarianism list



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list