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?"

Comments

Re:Attitude

[McBainLives]

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.