Why the NSA's snooping is unprecedented in scale and scope

[struggle4progress]

Tinker, Tailor, Miner, Spy
Why the NSA's snooping is unprecedented in scale and scope.
By Shane Harris and Tim Naftali
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2006, at 6:30 AM ET

Fifty years ago, officers from the Signal Security Agency, the predecessor to the National Security Agency, visited an executive from International Telephone and Telegraph and asked for copies of all foreign government cables carried by the company. The request was a direct violation of a 1934 law that banned the interception of domestic communications, but Attorney General Tom Clark backed it. Initially reluctant, ITT relented when told that its competitor, Western Union, had already agreed to supply this information. As James Bamford relates in his book The Puzzle Palace, the government told ITT it "would not desire to be the only non-cooperative company on the project." Codenamed Shamrock, the effort to collect cables sent through U.S.-controlled telegraph lines ultimately involved all the American telecom giants of the era, captured private as well as government cables, and lasted nearly 30 years. Like other illegal Cold War domestic snooping programs —such as the FBI's wiretaps without warrants and the CIA's mail-opening operations—it collapsed under the weight of public reaction to the abuses of executive power revealed by Vietnam and Watergate. <snip>

The magnitude of the current collection effort is unprecedented and indeed marks a shift in how the NSA spies in the United States. The current program seems to involve a remarkable level of cooperation with private companies and extraordinarily expansive data-mining of questionable legality. Before Bush authorized the NSA to expand its domestic snooping program after 9/11 in the secret executive order, the agency had to stay clear of the "protected communications" of American citizens or resident aliens unless supplied by a judge with a warrant. The program President Bush authorized reportedly allows the NSA to mine huge sets of domestic data for suspicious patterns, regardless of whether the source of the data is an American citizen or resident. The NSA needs the help of private companies to do this because commercial broadband now carries so many communications. In an earlier age, the NSA could pick up the bulk of what it needed by tapping into satellite or microwave transmissions. "Now," as the agency noted in a transition document prepared for the incoming Bush administration in December 2000, "communications are mostly digital, carry billions of bits of data, and contain voice, data and multimedia. They are dynamically routed, globally networked and pass over traditional communications means such as microwave or satellite less and less."

The agency used to search the transmissions it monitors for key words, such as names and phone numbers, which are supplied by other intelligence agencies that want to track certain individuals. But now the NSA appears to be vacuuming up all data, generally without a particular phone line, name, or e-mail address as a target. Reportedly, the agency is analyzing the length of a call, the time it was placed, and the origin and destination of electronic transmissions. Those details would be crucial in mining the data for patterns—according to the officials the Times cited, the goal of the NSA's eavesdropping system.

Pattern-based searches are most useful when run against huge sets of data. Many calls and messages must be analyzed to determine which ones are benign and which deserve more attention. With large data sets, pattern-based searching can create more nuanced pictures of the connections among people, places, and messages. Deputy Director of National Intelligence Michael Hayden, who until this year was the NSA director, recently hinted that the NSA's eavesdropping program is not just looking for transmissions from specific individuals. It has a "subtly softer trigger" that initiates monitoring without exactly knowing in advance what specific transmissions to look for. Presumably, this trigger is a suspicious pattern. But officials have not actually described any triggers, raising the question of whether the NSA has been authorized to go on such fishing expeditions. <snip>

http://www.slate.com/id/2133564/

[C_U_L8R]

1. I'm curious

Do they wiretap Foreign Leaders and their Embassies ?
Do they wiretap Corporate CEOs and their Boards?
Do they wiretap Political Adversaries and their Campaigns?
Do they wire tap the Pentagon and all Chains of Command?
Do they wiretap their own Base and Groups like the Freepers?
Do they wiretap you? Do they wiretap me?

Since the WHite House has broken the law and avoided judicial warrants
there's really no way to be sure who is being wiretapped .
Congress needs to march the whole lot of em.... the White House,
The NSA.... Independent Operators, etc... and put an immediate stop
to these ILLEGAL ACTS. Crimes are being commited and
congress must perform it's duty .. it must impeach.

[One_Life_To_Give]

2. Been tapped for decades

What fool doesn't know that all electronic communications have been monitored for decades?

[struggle4progress]

3. They've never had the capacity or authority to monitor ALL communications

[One_Life_To_Give]

4. Authority is like Badges

"We don't need no stinking Badges"

As too capacity. They must of had a problem at one point or they wouldn't of been trying to get our encryption keys.

[struggle4progress]

5. It is true that NSA has successfully fought against more secure ..

.. commercial encryption standards, supposedly on the grounds that national security would be endangered if the NSA computational facilities were completely unable to break encrypted texts. That doesn't mean they've always read all electronic communications.

[One_Life_To_Give]

6. Didn't some kid test that out?

An encrypted E-Mail threat, IIRC. SS was at the kids door within 24hrs?

[struggle4progress]

7. Gotta link? It's not clear to me what you're trying to say.

I guess anybody moronic enough to send a threatening email, encrypted or not, to a major government figure, might also be moronic enough to be surprised when the Secret Service came knocking ...

[One_Life_To_Give]

8. Exeter NH, E-Mail sent to a friend

digital_fortress

A: A few years ago, I was teaching on the campus of Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. One Spring day, unannounced, the U.S. Secret Service showed up and detained one of our students claiming he was a threat to national security. As it turned out, the kid had sent private E-mail to a friend saying how much he hated President Clinton and how he thought the president should be shot. The Secret Service came to campus to make sure the kid wasn't serious. After some interrogation the agents decided the student was harmless, and not much came of it. Nonetheless, the incident really stuck with me. I couldn't figure out how the secret service knew what these kids were saying in their E-mail.

It appears all of our E-Mails, etc. have been monitored for alot longer than just since 9/11.


edit: typo

[struggle4progress]

9. That's an interesting story. Several versions appear to be floating about:

in your link, "the kid had sent private E-mail to a friend saying how much he hated President Clinton and how he thought the president should be shot."

Or, "the student had the words "kill" and "Clinton" in the same sentence of an e-mail" http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=Dan%20Brown

Or, "The youth had sounded off on the internet about President Bill Clinton" http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1399908,00.html

These are rather different claims, and it is unclear exactly which version to credit. Brown himself mixes internet with email rather freely in his own version, which is provided in the plug for his novel, Digital Fortress: "the kid had been on the Internet the night before having a light-hearted political debate via E-mail with one of his friends and had made the comment that he was so mad at the current political situation he was ready to kill President Clinton. The Secret Service came up to make sure he wasn't serious. He wasn't, of course, and not much came of it. The incident however really stuck with me. I couldn't figure out how the Secret Service knew what these kids were saying in their E-mail" http://www.writerswrite.com/journal/may98/brown.htm

Of course, I am both jaded enough not to be surprised and simultaneously idealistic enough to be alarmed and shocked by these possibilities. But as the Bushista regime moves us toward dictatorship, I'd like to see better evidence for expansive claims. And since pointing the finger a Clinton seems only to serve a rightwing agenda, I am also not inclined to yawn that everybody's been doing it.