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More Details of the NSA's Social Network Analysis
mrogers writes "USA Today has a story describing how the NSA looks for suspicious calling patterns in the huge volumes of traffic data it collects. "Templates" such as a call from overseas followed by a flurry of domestic calls are used to identify leads, which are forwarded to the FBI for investigation. There have been complaints that low-quality leads are drawing agents away from other cases, and similar pattern-matching approaches have been found wanting in the past. Can data mining identify terrorists?"
In terms of catching terrorists, data-mining sucks. It makes no sense to pump enormous amounts of money into unproven technology, when national security is on the line.
If you want to catch terror cells, you'll never beat the 3 I's : intelligence, infiltration and informants.
A country of 300 million people cannot have that many actual terrorists in it, even if you count domestic lunies like Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber in the category (or more accurately the next generation of bomb making lunies). Monitoring a sizable fraction of that 300m can't possibly be just about finding "terrorists" - for one thing it's a needle in a haystack, and for another the number of other uses/abuses of such a system are too many to count.
Bruce Schneier explained this very well in a recent article...or maybe it was in "Beyond Fear". Probably both. At any rate, his general thinking goes like this: terrorist detection methods are only particularly useful if they generate a low number of false positives and a low number of false negatives.
Hey, I found the article: http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70357-1.html
Paragraphs 5, 6, 7, and 8 are the most relevant. So basically, the NSA has built a system that is absolutely unable to do the job that it was designed for (or at least for the job that they are claiming it is designed for). There are a lot of smart people working at the NSA, and no doubt they have arrived at this conclusion on their own. So why are they building this surveillance network then, if they know that it will not work? Since there's no way that they could follow up on all of the leads such a system would generate, there must be some other use for it.
You can't use the system to find the needle in the random, anonymized haystack. But if you have an suspected terrorist, then you have an idea where to start looking. If the CIA or FBI has identified Mohammed Smith as a terrorist, they could use this system to analyze his calling patterns and associations to find other potential terrorists, and analyze those numbers to find other terrorists, etc. By this method they could potentially identify, thwart, and capture the terrorsts threatening the country. Of course, they don't actually need this secret domestic spying system to do this though. If they have identified a suspect then they can get a warrant from a court, or file a FISA letter with the FISA court to get the same information.
There are already appropriate and effective legal channels to obtain the information that this system provides. So why the alternate system? The only answer that remains is that it would be used for purposes outside the scope of the law. An effective use would be to see who has been calling journalists and blowing the whistle on illegeal wiretapping programs. Hmm...
Aside from this being patently illegal...
Is it, now? There's more to the Constitution than the 4th Amendment- try looking at Art. IV, Section 4 - The Executive and Legislature are obliged to protect the States, and any Judiciary right to review regarding such efforts is limited under the "political question" doctrine.
what bothers me is the cavalier attitude behind it...
If you don't like a politician's personality, vote for someone else. If your candidate loses, wait patiently for the next election. Repeat as necessary. Campaign for someone if you like. Run for office, even. That's how our brand of democracy works.
and the fact that it is already being abused to track down people who aren't terrorists...
Name one person who has even been charged, let alone detained.
but who are merely doing their job to keep government entities like the NSA under some semblance of control - the journalists.
Read that pesky Constitution again. Journalists aren't part of the system. The NSA is an executive agency subject to congressional and judicial (not journalistic) oversight. Besides, "freedom of the press" has never conferred any special status on trained "journalists." Free speech and press rights apply equally to all citizens.
There is no end to the manner in which this kind of information could be abused.
Puffery. Records of who calls who is a type of circumstantial evidence regularly obtained by law enforcement and accepted as relevant by courts. This is merely a matter of scale. And besides, the courts are usually more concerned with actual harm than potential harm, of which there has been none so far. Good luck seeking an injuction against continuation of a program which serves a compelling state interest. Even if a court (like the 9th Circus) were to find this program to be unlawful, the proper remedy would be to apply the usual exclusionary rule to any such evidence and evidence derived therefrom in a criminal trial of a suspected terrorist, or a self-righteous journalist who knowingly publishes unlawfully obtained classified information.
Again- read the Constitution. The whole thing.
I came, I saw, I left. It looked better in the brochure.
A little more famous only in the eyes of the media. Look at the election results, Badnarik got only about 65k less votes then Nadar. From that you could say Nadar is more popular, but I gurantee if Nadar didn't have the 4.5 times more campaign funds and, more importantly, the extra media croverage(Badnarick probably got around .1% the coverage Nadar got, .000000001% the coverage the rep. and dem. got), he could have come a lot closer to winning. It is the combination of the media dictating who wins and stupid americans not caring to even attempt to be smart enough to figure it out for themsleves. Life is easier when you let other people make the tough decisions for you.
"I don't need drugs to enjoy this, just to enhance it" - Otto