Entries Tagged "NSA"
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NSA Combing Through MySpace
New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon’s National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology – specifically the forthcoming “semantic web” championed by the web standards organisation W3C – to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals.
If the NSA Surveillance Happened in the European Union
Fascinating essay about how EU law would treat the NSA’s collection of everyone’s phone records.
The Ultimate Net Monitoring Tool
You too can spy on the Internet, just like the NSA.
(And while we’re on the topic, you really should read about the equipment the NSA installed at the AT&T switches. Wow.)
Winkler on NSA Spying
Ira Winkler on why the NSA spying hurts security.
The Problems with Data Mining
Great op-ed in The New York Times on why the NSA’s data mining efforts won’t work, by Jonathan Farley, math professor at Harvard.
The simplest reason is that we’re all connected. Not in the Haight-Ashbury/Timothy Leary/late-period Beatles kind of way, but in the sense of the Kevin Bacon game. The sociologist Stanley Milgram made this clear in the 1960’s when he took pairs of people unknown to each other, separated by a continent, and asked one of the pair to send a package to the other—but only by passing the package to a person he knew, who could then send the package only to someone he knew, and so on. On average, it took only six mailings—the famous six degrees of separation—for the package to reach its intended destination.
Looked at this way, President Bush is only a few steps away from Osama bin Laden (in the 1970’s he ran a company partly financed by the American representative for one of the Qaeda leader’s brothers). And terrorist hermits like the Unabomber are connected to only a very few people. So much for finding the guilty by association.
A second problem with the spy agency’s apparent methodology lies in the way terrorist groups operate and what scientists call the “strength of weak ties.” As the military scientist Robert Spulak has described it to me, you might not see your college roommate for 10 years, but if he were to call you up and ask to stay in your apartment, you’d let him. This is the principle under which sleeper cells operate: there is no communication for years. Thus for the most dangerous threats, the links between nodes that the agency is looking for simply might not exist.
(This, by him, is also worth reading.)
NSA Eavesdropping
This is the line that’s done best for me on the radio: “The NSA would like to remind everyone to call their mothers this Sunday. They need to calibrate their system.”
NSA Creating Massive Phone-Call Database
There’s other NSA news today: USA Today is reporting that the NSA is collecting a massive traffic-analysis database on Americans’ phone calls. This looks like yet another piece of Echelon technology turned against Americans.
The NSA’s domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop—without warrants—on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA’s efforts to create a national call database.
[…]
The government is collecting “external” data on domestic phone calls but is not intercepting “internals,” a term for the actual content of the communication, according to a U.S. intelligence official familiar with the program. This kind of data collection from phone companies is not uncommon; it’s been done before, though never on this large a scale, the official said. The data are used for “social network analysis,” the official said, meaning to study how terrorist networks contact each other and how they are tied together.
Note that this database does not just contain phone calls that either originate or terminate outside the U.S. This database is mostly domestic calls: calls we all make everyday.
AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth are all providing this information to the NSA. Only Quest has refused.
According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest’s CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA’s assertion that Qwest didn’t need a court order—or approval under FISA—to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers’ information and how that information might be used.
Financial implications were also a concern, the sources said. Carriers that illegally divulge calling information can be subjected to heavy fines. The NSA was asking Qwest to turn over millions of records. The fines, in the aggregate, could have been substantial.
The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information—known as “product” in intelligence circles—with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest’s lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.
The NSA, which needed Qwest’s participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard.
Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest’s patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest’s refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.
In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest’s foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.
Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest’s lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.
We should also assume that the cellphone companies received the same pressure, and probably caved.
This is important to every American, not just those with something to hide. Matthew Yglesias explains why:
It’s important to link this up to the broader chain. One thing the Bush administration says it can do with this meta-data is to start tapping your calls and listening in, without getting a warrant from anyone. Having listened in on your calls, the administration asserts that if it doesn’t like what it hears, it has the authority to detain you indefinitely without trial or charges, torture you until you confess or implicate others, extradite you to a Third World country to be tortured, ship you to a secret prison facility in Eastern Europe, or all of the above. If, having kidnapped and tortured you, the administration determines you were innocent after all, you’ll be dumped without papers somewhere in Albania left to fend for yourself.
Judicial oversight is a security system, and unchecked military and police power is a security threat.
EDITED TO ADD (5/11): Orin Kerr on the legality of the program. Updated here.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.