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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?"
The problem is, this strategy is not only ineffective, it can be counterproductive.
There is plenty out there on the "Strength of weak links", where past associations (old roommates, sleeper cells), with not contact can be very strong service links when reinitiated.
There is also plenty out there on how this is DoSing the FBI.
And the tin foil hat crowd (a very popular piece of headware these days) will point out that this tool is far more useful for targeting individuals than searching for patterns. And what if you are the target?
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If this wholesale data mining works, then the government will tout this success as justification for its acts. If it doesn't work, the government will complain that we're not letting them do enough to ensure our safety, and use the failure to justify even more outrageous violations of our privacy.
Whether it works or not, however, is beside the point. The point is: is it legal? Enough people have maintained that it is not to warrant a serious investigation into the matter.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Aside from this being patently illegal, what bothers me is the cavalier attitude behind it, and the fact that it is already being abused to track down people who aren't terrorists, but who are merely doing their job to keep government entities like the NSA under some semblance of control - the journalists. There is no end to the manner in which this kind of information could be abused.
She's always getting calls from various places and then making a flurry of more local calls. She uses code phrases like "your cousin's baby was born last night and it's a boy", or "Great Aunt Zelda had a stroke but they say she's going to be okay".
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
"Hey Akbar, just calling to let you know Mohamed and Alimah just had a healthy baby boy!"
"Oh great, I'll let the family over here know!"
*meanwhile, in the basement of a bunker somewhere*
"My God! It's nine eleven times ten thousand! Nine million one hundred and ten thousand!"
Whoever said this was about "terrorists"?
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.
Bet good money that most of the people who are or will be advesely affected by this surveilance have little or no connection with terrorism. Even if there was once some noble intent of protecting people by finding monsters hidden among them, it won't just be used for that. Any time you have a major source of power in polical hands, you can bet on it being abused eventually - and what greater power over a domestic population is there than widespread spying without judicial oversight?
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
"Can data mining identify terrorists?"
No. It can identify people who have calling patterns associated with terrorist activity, regardless of whether they are a terrorist or not.
Note that these calling patterns cannot be used to associate that person with a committed or planned crime in the normal data mining scenario.
Data mining is unreasonable search.
Now, I have no problem if they've got evidence of a crime or plan of a crime, and use known information to deduce who might else be involved. That's investigative work.
Data mining is speculative work, not investigative, so regardless of whether it *can* be used for speculative 'research' into the activity of American citizens, it *shouldn't* be.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
This won't work at all.
They are operating under a logical fallacy. A flurry of calls after an overseas call does not mean the two are related in any way. Perhaps (and more likely than the person being a terrorist) is that the person which received the overseas call and then calls domestically is just relaying family information.
I know my family operated like this (although completely within the US). All you had to do was tell my grandmother something, and you could rest assured she'd spread the news to the rest of the family for you.
What ever happened to "Live free or die", "Give me liberty or give me death", or "Those who are willing to sacrifice their basic liberties to assure their security deserve neither."?
Those quotes are not just platitudes... they are *good ideas*.
Keep the canned patriotism, give me my rights, and I'll just take my chances.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
And let's not forget all those out there with girlfriends/boyfriends they don't want their wives/husbands to find out about. That alone could make great extortion material and provide a new way to fund covert operations.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
There was a local news story about a terrorism suspect who was picked up locally because of a tip from a flight school. Not from monitoring his phone calls, not by fingerprinting him when he came into the country, not by spy plane, satellite or any other whiz bang technology. Just a clerk at a airport counter in the middle of bf nowhere. And that's the sensor net that offers the best hope we have of combating terrorism. The clerk at the store, the landlord they rent from, the agent at the ticket counter, the hotel clerk, rental car company, bell hops, and neighbors. It's not depending on the government to keep us safe because they can't. Government is too big and too slow to respond to a ever changing threat landscape. Had we not spent the last five years alienating the muslim and mid-eastern communities in this country and abusing the few Arab allies we have in the mid-east, we might have been able to develop a community network that would have been effective and inexpensive (in relative terms).
No one seriously believes oceans can defend us, just like no one can seriously believe all the invasive technology being loosed on the people paying the bills is going to be any more effective.
It's all really quite insane.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Because in order for your vote to count, it has to agree with a large number of other votes. If we got a libertarian for President--say, Michael Badnarik--then the NSA would have to hide its spying from the President, as well. But for any national candidate to succeed, they need media coverage. For some reason, Ralph Nader, who was only on the ballot in 36 states, got far more coverage than Badnarik, who was on the ballot in (I believe) 49 states. Why? Because Nader couldn't have won, so the media could safely involve him.
So, your choices for every election are between media coalitions. Which generally means that each of the major US parties supports slightly differing sections of the economy--service sector for the Democrats, production for the Republicans. That's the major difference.
Now, armed resistance is ridiculous when the government has billions of dollars of military equipment. And other technological countermeasures will likely prove ineffective in a short period of time.
The most effective way of stopping terrorists is taking away their cause. Believe it or not, terrorists don't blow up hundreds of people as well as themselves because they "hate freedom" or any of that rubbish.
America's data set on terrorism is in the single digits, and the data they do have is only partially complete. This means the only system that can be programmed is a set of user-created rules that "flag" questionable behavior. The solution is a poor one and will only improve our chances at detection by a fraction of a percent. (Seems a huge price to pay for privacy trampling to me.)
In order to detect terrorism on American soil effectively, we'd need a larger data set. Otherwise we're just attempting to reverse engineer a process that essentially defines itself as dynamic enough to avoid detection. We'd need a frequent source of terrorism that we could derive models and nets off of. The immediate source that comes to mind is Iraq. If I were in charge of the NSA program, I think the best course of action would be to harness the call-traffic (satellite and domestic), email activity and other "data" that precedes suicide bombers (or other known acts of terrorism) in Iraq. Using this data you could train a system to recognize similarities in America. Short of that, anything the NSA is trying is a crap shoot.
No. Freeing up lines of communication, preparing quick and actionable responses to warnings, and better general population awareness are probably more effective than grabbing a billion pieces of data and sifting through it for answers. It's impossible for a human to know what to look for, and until the NSA comes clean in what it's actualy doing, there's no justification for stomping out the few freedoms we still have. There are better alternatives out there that can be done with the help of the community and still preserve the integrity of our privacy.
you have to be kidding! you're claiming that the media covered Nader because he could not have won, but Badnarik could have won and so they didn't cover him? they didn't cover Badnarik because even if he was on the ballot in 150 states, he still could not have won. i agree - its a poor reason to avoid covering Badnarik and his party's ideas, but lets get serious about the reasons here.