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NSA Chose Invasive Phone Analysis Option
Encrypted Anonymous Coward writes "The Baltimore Sun reveals the existence of an interesting experimental NSA program codenamed ThinThread from the late 90`s. The program involved link analysis of traffic data, with a twist; The phone numbers from the U.S. would only be analyzed in an encrypted form. This way the analysis would potentially be possible under existing privacy laws, according to the people behind the program. The NSA could gather further unencrypted details if there was evidence of a threat. Political infighting seems to have dropped an interesting and respectful program from the books."
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I'd rather be flamed than ignored.
Thank you!
One of the scariest/funniest things out of the Attorney General's mouth in response to the revelations back in December, was that the searches* "weren't unreasonable", and thus didn't need warrants.
*phone taps
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I don't see how this gets around the fact that, like the CIA, the NSA is NOT supposed to be gathering intelligence within the borders of the United States (see the executive order that created the NSA)- that is the FBI's responsibility. President Bush used an executive order to allow for the NSA to investigate within the USA after 9/11.
...the NSA's United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18 (USSID 18) strictly prohibits the interception or collection of information about "...US persons, entities, corporations or organizations..." without explicit written legal permission from the Attorney General of the United States"
I believe that any monitoring that originates and terminates in the United States prior to Bush's executive order is illegal (it's also illegal after Bush's order, IMO) unless Clinton also gave an executive order to permit it.
From wikipedia:
Technical details of such a system are documented in "Vegas 911" in April's issue of the IEEE Spectrum.
The article document's Jeffery Jonas' development of an anonymized system for the NSA based on his security work in Las Vegas. The work is now being done by IBM. The example in the article demonstrates how anonymized cruise passenger data could be compared with an anonymized watch list by a trusted third party. If the trusted third party finds correlations in the data, the government agency can get a warrant for the specific passenger data from the cruise line.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/apr06/3171 (registration required)
As a matter of law - a police detective, in the course of a criminal investigation, can pull the LUDS for anyone without a warrant. This is essentially what the NSA is accused of doing on a massive scale. While I find both cases objectionable invasions, they are not illegal or unconstitutional.
See: Loving v. Virginia , Griswald v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird , among others.
2^5
Not +5, funny anymore, I am afraid its insightfull.
there really isn't a real "Right to Privacy" in the Constitution.
... The present case, then, concerns a relationship lying within the zone of privacy created by several fundamental constitutional guarantees."
Well, actually, in 1965 the Constitutional basis for a right to privacy was recognized explicitly by the Supreme Court. It began with the case of Griswold v. Connecticut (381 U.S. 479). In short, they explained that the Constitution has what are called "penumbral rights"---rights that are inferrable by virtue of being necessary precursors to the rights more explicitly spelled out.
From Griswold v. Connecticut:
"The Fourth and Fifth Amendments were described in Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 630, as protection against all governmental invasions 'of the sanctity of a man's home and the privacies of life.' We recently referred in Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 656, to the Fourth Amendment as creating a 'right to privacy, no less important than any other right carefully and particularly reserved to the people.' See Beaney, The Constitutional Right to Privacy, 1962 Sup. Ct. Rev. 212; Griswold, The Right to be Let Alone, 55 Nw. U. L. Rev. 216 (1960)
The explicit rights that grant a right to privacy as a precursor are the 4th, 5th, and the 9th, though the Justices said (and have upheld numerous times since, fyi) that the right to privacy may be inferred from other amendments as well, it's just that the 4th, 5th, and the 9th are particularly obvious in their inference.
So, yes, since 1965, U.S. Law has upheld EXPLICITLY that we have a Contitutional right to privacy.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom
You're correct in that the CIA, NSA, and other arms of the Intelligence Community are tasked to target foreign entities, but they are not as geographically limited as you might imagine.
The CIA, for example, operates within the U.S. performing some functions like those it has overseas. It attempts to recruit foreign assets who will work with them upon return to their home countries, interviews Americans that travel overseas to countries of interest on a strictly voluntary basis, and supports and cooperates in counter-intelligence operations with the FBI. It is also involved in tracking and collecting intelligence on foreigners visiting the U.S. The matter is not geography so much as nationality. For the CIA to target a U.S. citizen requires authorization, a strong reason to do so, and generally is done as a result of that citizen's affiliation with a foreign power and frequently as part of a CI operation. Obviously, the CIA does not have the authority to carry out arrests or other traditional law enforcement tasks.
The NSA is similar. It was actually created in 1952, although it receives much of its marching orders from EO 12333, which generally directs the IC (or at least it did so before the restructuring of 2003). It openly targets foreign missions and embassies operating within the U.S. and it only makes sense to involve it in foreign threats to the U.S., such as terrorists and intelligence agencies (everyone from the Chinese to the French...). The question in the original "wiretapping" scandal was phone calls from FOREIGN entities to the U.S. - if it's from a foreigner, it's free game provided with proper authorization which came in the last case. It must be noted that FISA was written to deal with CI matters, not international terrorism, which is a fundamentally different threat.
>For better or worse, there really isn't a real "Right to Privacy" in the Constitution.
Did you know that some of the Founders didn't want to include a Bill of Rights? All were in favor of human rights (at least for white people, sigh) but some were afraid that if they wrote down a list then later generations might mistake it for an exhaustive list and might begin violating rights that hadn't been written down.
They put in the Ninth Amendment to spell out in black and white that all other rights were still guaranteed even if they didn't get a slot in the Bill of Rights. They did that to make absolutely sure that nobody in the future could ever disparage a right by saying "it's not in the Constitution".
>If we don't want the government to look over our shoulders, then we can't bitch when they didn't see something coming.
Why not? Aside from the "if they've got something why don't they get FISA warrants" question, why can't we bitch when the government finds plots (without mass domestic spying) and refuses to even ask for warrants?