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."

Comments

Re:Privacy Issues

[mausmalone]

I think you're misunderstanding. The proposed program would look at phone call records only, not actual phone calls. (basically, it would know who's calling who and when, but not why or what they talked about... and even then it would only know that anonymous sudonym A was contacting anonymous sudonym B, not who you actually are) If they see some alarming pattern (i.e. one person calling another right before a terrorist attack, but never any other time) they could get a court order to expose who those encrypted phone numbers belong to.

Realistically, that doesn't really give them much information to work from, but if they were able to get some more narrowing information that's not an identifier (i.e. what country/state/province/city the numbers correlate to), they could actually search for some real patterns without knowing whose numbers they're looking at until there's probable cause for a warrant.