I am not a fan of absolutes... They can make me a little nuts... some of you may think I'm always nuts. ;) [NSA Captures Every Phone Call]

I was watching a video on Youtube today where Ex-CIA Robert David Steele was a guest. In the interview he stated that the NSA captures "Every Phone Call and Every Email". My pet peeve kicked in. That word EVERY makes that an absolute. There is something about absolutes. They are ALMOST always false. Why? It only takes a single exception for the statement to be false.

I responded that this was a myth and I explained why. This was youtube.

His only response was "You don't know as much as you think you do."

Well in this particular case I know a bit more than he apparently does. You see, I build and deploy SIP based phone systems, trunks, etc. I have also setup and maintained the email servers, the DNS servers, and the MX Records for my company and many others. So I actually know this technology quite well.

Before I go into the details on why BOTH of these are a myth I want to say that it is likely that had he said the NSA captures "MOST Phone calls, and MOST email" that very well may be true. I can guarantee you they do not capture ALL of either of those things.

So if that is the case I need to be able to show you are least one exception. I can do that.

If I make a phone call in my office it goes out to my PBX system. The PBX sees I was calling NXX-XXX-XXXX where you can replace those with a phone number. It looks at that number. If it is outside of the office it sends that out over our phone trunk to whomever our provider is. However, if I am calling another office that is also connected to that PBX it never leaves the premise. In fact those calls will WORK even without a trunk to the outside world. The NSA does not capture these calls. Therefore it is an exception and disproves the absolute.

This same exact scenario also applies to how email works. You send your email and it first goes to whatever email server you are connected to. If that server is local it looks and makes a determination of whether it needs to reach out over the internet.

These could be done inside a house, or with a cable run between houses in a neighborhood and those would not be captured. So that disproves the absolute.

However, most calls that are not ON NET (Local to the PBX or Carrier Network) will actually go out on the internet and very possibly go through some pretty big centralized locations. These would be the places the NSA taps into. It is very likely that they do capture every cell phone call, and that would qualify as MOST calls these days.

When I referred to the carrier for PBX trunks. In my case I am a Senior Network Engineer for such a carrier. We then reach out to other carriers if the calls are not on our network. Otherwise some calls if they are between different clients of ours could in theory never actually leave our network.

To further back this up. We recently had to work on getting our company CALEA certified. This is the certification that puts a device onsite that can be used to TAP a call. We have not completed this process and are only now working on it. This means at this time we have no mechanism in place for them to TAP within our network.

Furthermore, that does not cover ALL calls even when we do it. A SIP call in the protocol we use takes 88Kbps in bandwidth per call though we typically round up to 100Kbps when we are doing math. So we'll say with a 1Mbps internet connection we can do 10 calls simultaneously.

If we have a call center client (many of our clients are such) with a T1 or PRI then that is a 1.544Mbps circuit. So it can be safely said to carry 15 calls at a time.

Why does this matter?

When CALEA is tapping a call it needs to send a duplicate of the call to a remote location. This means it will take 100Kbps to go to its intended destination AND it takes 100Kbps to send the call to the remote tap.

This is not a big deal when they do a couple calls in our data center at a time.

Yet let's say we had 1000 calls going on with clients. That would amount to a 100Mbps circuit being required.

So if our internet was 100Mbps we could handle those 1000 calls. IF the NSA was tapping all of our calls we would need to double that bandwidth and it would take 200Mbps which is not supported by the physical infrastructure of the circuit. Thus, it is impossible.

This scenario would be required IF they were also recording all ON NET calls.

Once they leave our network and are out there somewhere on the world passing through big internet back bone hubs those locations could easily have a device or large circuit on them that duplicates data. So this is likely where the majority of calls are recorded.

Is there a way they could record our ON NET calls? Sure if they contact me or someone and we work with them to hook some more circuits into our network to carry duplicates of the calls they could do it. In our network no such circuits exist. I know because I configured them, I ran the cables, and I frequently physically look at these cables.

So it is a MYTH that they record all calls.

All of this also applies to EMAIL. However, once it transits the public internet in some way then it is very possible they are captured and recorded.

A thing about voice protocols. They are created by groups such as IEEE that creates the standards. That doesn't mean people cannot make non-standard versions of calls either, or even on ramps. It also doesn't stop people from making calls over a VPN. In fact sometimes they do. VPN calls they wouldn't capture either.

So while yes, I agree with Robert David Steele that I very likely don't know as much as I think I do. In this particular case I suspect I know a bit more than he does.

People really need to stop trying to use Appeals To Authority to make people blindly agree with what they say.

I didn't disagree with the other things he was talking about for the most part, but this MYTH. I disagree with this MYTH.

If he wants to not use an absolute and say MOST instead of EVERY then I'd say he could be right in that case.