Meant to add, before the Candorville link, that it looks like it was all one big domestic spying program after all. Big surprise.
Forgive me for turning away from the sociopolitical implications of this latest pogram, disturbing as they are, and ask the question: does the scheme even work?
They call it “social network analysis” (and Lord, doesn’t that sound like something invented by some marketing genius [for “genius”, read “turd”]). They are, in effect, trying to infer “calling circles” from all this raw data. Now, those circles will overlap in millions of ways. So how can they possible tell which patterns are significant and which are not? If someone in the Dirty Widdle Terrorist Calling Circle is also part of the Aunt Bertha’s Quilting Society Calling Circle, then the two are linked and Bertha should be investigated posthaste.
In effect, the NSA is playing the Telco Edition of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with two trillion phone calls.
I would call Gee Whiz Bush a shithead, but that would be a grievous insult to fecal matter everywhere.
. . . Walk right in, it’s around in back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track . . .
Depends on what you mean by ‘work,’ of course.
Def. 1: ‘work’ = we can identify clusters of people who are more strongly connected to each other than they are to other people who they might occasionally call.
Yeah, that works to a fair extent. There’s a graph-theoretic property called n-connectedness that you can test for. Say you’ve got 8 people in the Osama Fan Club and Bomb Squad, and 10 people in Aunt Bertha’s Quilting Society, and one of the members of the former is Aunt Bertha’s nephew, so they occasionally call each other.
Meanwhile, not everybody in the OFC&BS calls each other, but there’s enough traffic in different ways amongst them so that if each person is a node, and two nodes are linked if they talk on the phone, you’d have to break 4 links to disconnect the OCF&BS subgraph. It’s “4-connected” which is pretty strongly connected. Meanwhile, practically everybody in ABQS calls almost everybody else, so the ABQS subgraph is, say, 8-connected. But then if you take the subgraph with everybody in both groups, the whole shmeer is only 1-connected - cut the link between Bertha and her nephew, and you’ve disconnected the graph. This tells you it would be surprising to find that they were really one big organization, rather than two separate organizations with some incidental connection. And you can read that from seeing where the connectedness numbers abruptly drop.
Graph theory: the Tinkertoys of mathematics. 
Def. 2: ‘work’ = we can protect ourselves better against the terrorists with this database.
I suppose so, but they’d have to do the obvious - combine it with lots of other databases. They’d want names and addresses, just for starters, and who knows what-all after that.
But it’s hard for me to believe they care. I mean, we could also guard against terrorist activity by screening 100% of the incoming cargo at our ports, by requiring security standards for our chemical plants, come up with ways to increase the security of toxic chemicals when they’re being shipped by rail (or at least keep them away from populated areas where blowing up a rolling chlorine tank might kill thousands), and so forth. This was all obvious stuff to do back in the fall of 2001, and it’s still sitting there, undone. Might inconvenience the folks with the money, you know.
Def. 3: ‘work’ = we can keep a closer eye on people whose politics we don’t like.
I quoted this in post #41:
Those questions are treason! You have been detected as guilty of seditious tenedencies! Stay where you are. You will be collected shortly and sent for re-Americanisation.
Every day, Orwell’s vision of the future grow closer and closer.
What would the reaction be if the President applied the same justification to monitoring all credit card transactions? It would go something like this: “We won’t look at the content of the transaction, just the parties involved, the time & date and the amount. The 911 hijackers all used credit cards, so it is vital in the war on terror to analyze all credit transactions to find patterns that will lead to the prevention of another attack on freedom”
How is this different from monitoring all phone records? In both cases, I have a private transaction with a commercial entity with the expectation of privacy. If the credit card companies voluntarily enter into a contract with the NSA to provide records, it would be completely legal. And even if they didn’t want to do it voluntarily, a national security letter or some other instrument would make it legal and mandatory.
At what point to we say “enough is enough”? I would rather risk an occasional 911 than cede another inch of liberty to Bush’s ham handed over-reaction.
Yup, The Decider (or is it the Decisionator) decides all decisions.
Kevin Drum links to this opinion piece in the Washington Post, apparently written by a “Former Bush apparatchik” who is pimping the word “anonymized” as a description of the data in this Bush program. I don’t expect anything but a grunt from these fucking pigs, but Jesus, either he is the dumbest motherfucker or he thinks we are:
The Post should not have printed this at all, or should have stopped right at “The [use] of anonymized data can pinpoint individuals”. If it can pinpoint INDIVIDUALS, it’s not really very ANONYMOUS, is it, you stupid cunt?
This administration and its gaggle of lickspittles is full of very stupid people.
This all sounds very familiar to me for some reason.
AT&T sent out a card months ago saying it would pass along your telecommunications information, calling habits, and other data — minus your name and phone number — for generic “marketing purposes.”
I opted out of that silly shit months ago. Now I’m beginning to wonder exactly where that data is actually ending up.
Stupid is a gross understatement. The Washington Post was “outed” as a bunch of worthless partisan lapdogs quite a while ago anyway.
Thanks, RT. I now know rather more than I want to on that subject. 
This dragnet approach still seems rather unwieldly to me; but the folks involved probably don’t care since some poor computer has to do all the heavy lifting. Maybe I’ve been watching too much Law & Order, but it seems to me the proper way to do this is to pull the LUDs of a “person of interest” and work out from there (and thus leave you and me and poor Aunt Bertha out of this).
Always glad to send someone running, screaming, from the room.
Me too. Just because this technique has the ability to identify many clusters of people who work or play together, doesn’t remotely justify to me the massive intrusion on our privacy. They’re asking for the right to identify ten million Aunt Bertha’s Quilting Circles in order to - perhaps - be able to ID a terrorist cell or two.
And of course, which of those ten million clusters is a terrorist cell is only clear once you’ve got a bit of extra info - and they could use extra info to get a FISA warrant and do it all legally in the first place, without wholesale violations of privacy.
The scope of this operation is just astounding. What is telling, however, is that when Qwest refused to turn over records and said them would cooperate with a subpoena or warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Court, NSA didn’t go to the court. If getting the records was all that important, if %100 coverage was important, why not?
Also telling is NSA blocking a Department of Justice inquiry by saying that the DoJ people did not have appropriate security clearances. Unless I’ve missed something here NSA and DoJ are both government agencies in the executive department and take their marching order from the President. It seem like a pretty simple task for the President to pick up the phone and tell Mr. Negroponte to let the DoJ guys in and that NSA had better cooperate or there would be some job openings. So far as I can tell, that hasn’t happened. Why not?
It seems to me that it is time for the Great Decider to start doing some deciding.
I’d say he already has.
Decision 1: Court review of various and sundry possibly-illegal Administration programs = bad.
Decision 2: Any review or investigation not run by someone politically trustworthy (e.g. Sen. Pat Roberts) who can be counted on to sweep any bad shit under the rug = bad.
But you knew this.
I’ve been trying to find out more about this, and if everyone could just take off their partisan hats for a second, and tell me if this is innacurate.
The USA Today article is simply nothing more than a rehashing of the Christmas article in the NYT which is a rehashing of Echelon (Conservatives can claim that this was started under Clinton, Libs can claim that while that’s true it was Bush that put it to improper use.)
Most likely the timing of this article is to coincide with Bush’s CIA appointment, bit it really isn’t telling us anything new at all, correct?
Thanks for that. It shows to me that NSA knew they were in over their heads and knew they didn’t have a legal leg to stand on. Too bad the other services caved. I only hope the hearings rip the cavers a new one.
I heard Rush Limbaugh read Friday from a telecomunications act signed by Bill Clinton which compelled these carriers to surrender information when required by warrant or “other lawful means.”
Rush Limbaugh argued that clearly this recognizes that there are other lawful means to require these records than simply by warrant.
For example, he stated that local law enforcement agencies have routine access to this type of information for investigations and procure it without warrant.
I have no idea whether that’s true, and I may have misheard, but I’ll throw it out there in case there’s a cop or lawyer who has insight and can clarify.
Scylla, my understanding is that Echelon was and is primarily abount monitoring international calls and that that has been going on for quite some time.
What’s new is that this data includes essentially information about the calling patterns of all AT&T, Bell and Verizon customers in the United States. It’s the largest data base in the world. NSA collected this information without going through FISA and without a warrant. They pressured the phone companies and gave them money for the information.
Also, from what I have heard, this program was the brainchild of the man who has been nominated to head the CIA. It has nothing to do with Echelon.
I beleive you’re mistaken there. The Christmas article in the NYT talked about it as being domestic as did other articles in 1998 and the Sixty Minutes episode.
If I understand correctly (and I may not) the “monitoring” is the actual listening to International calls that the NSA does and it does that Internationally. Databases are collected domestically. I confess to having read contradictory information about this as terms are used differently by different sources. In one source collecting a database of calls like mentioned in last weeks USA Today may be called “monitoring.” This does not seem to be what Bush means when he talks about “monitoring” of phone calls by “known Al Quaeda types into and out of the country.” That seems to be describing eavesdropping.
On the other hand it may be that the data base is collected nationally and internationally and onle “mined” internationally and that that is what Bush means by “monitoring.”
The whole thing is kind of confused as to exactly what is going on where and by who and to what extent, which is why I asked if this USA today article actually told us anything new. It didn’t look like it did, but I’m not sure.
Ok, but that’s not new. Steve Croft was talking about this on 60 Minutes in 1998. He said that the NSA had a record of every phone call, email, data transmission and even things from Baby Monitors, and this was called Echelon. I don’t think the issue is whether it exists. It’s existed for a long time. I think the issue is how it’s being used or mined.
Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong here. I am trying to figure this out.
I thought he was big in Echelon and responsible for some of its failures (read that on CNN.com yesterday)
I’m confused.
Nononononooooo! The world is much better off when BushIIInc. doesn’t decide anything. I’ve underwhelmed with most political types but this is the first presidential administration so godawful bad the best hope is that it gets distracted by a cat toy. Ooooh, shiny! Chase! Pounce on this, mighty hunter! No claws in humans, now.
Know what genuinely boggles my mind? This nimrod and his supporters are doing this in the name of conservatism. You know, minimal govermental interference? Rights of the individual?
Orwell was right. Trumpet a catch-phrase loudly enough, then you do the exact opposite.