Re:Federal judge sanctions Seattle officials for deleting texts
by shadowgovt on Friday February 17, 2023 @02:32PM
(#34839233)
I'm not even sure we can extrapolate that the NSA is storing anything like every text message long-term (as opposed to metadata, or samples, or the full transcripts of individuals targeted for investigation, or a machine learning trained weights set to flag messages that indicate someone should go on the targeted-for-investigation list).
6 billion text messages are sent per day in the US. That's about the volume of Google web searches, and I know from experience Google doesn't have the capacity to log every search or the logs of evaluation of every search. If Google lacks the capacity, I suspect the NSA lacks the capacity.
Re:Federal judge sanctions Seattle officials for deleting texts
by GauntletWizard on Friday February 17, 2023 @04:34PM
(#34840873)
* * *
AT&T is almost certainly not storing every text message long-term. The NSA likely is. It wouldn't be surprising if that's via a direct PRISM-style integration, but it still means subpoenaing AT&T for old texts is likely to not be productive. (As it was not productive in this particular case.)
Subpoena the NSA and they'll say "no, for national security reasons".