NSA uses traffic analysis
So it now turns out that President Bush lied last month when he said that his authorization of domestic espionage only extended to Al Quadeh suspects, when at least one member of the phone call was overseas. Yesterday it turned out that NSA has been given the call records of hundreds of millions of Americans by three large telecommunications companies: Verizon, ATT&T and Bell South. Apparently Qwest refused.
So, which is more surprising; that Bush lied, that NSA is actually monitoring Americans or that Qwest refused to be involved. I go with the last one. Kudos to Qwest. Really. That took guts.
What was turned over was apparently not the calls themselves, but the details; presumably things like number from, number to, length of call, time of start, time of end.
I can hear someone saying, "why that's not so bad!'
Ah, but it is. For two reasons. The first is because of an intelligence technique known as "traffic analysis" (TA). TA is an underwhelming, but highly useful way of gleaning organizational information by charting out who talks to whom and when. These diagrams of phone calls fall into several well-known patterns like stars and the analysts can look at the figures and explain who's friends with whom, who calls the shots, etc.
They can also penetrate aliases. A classic use is to compare the diagram of a "working star" of aliases to other diagrams of known individuals. If there's a match, then it's likely that it's the same group. This approach even extends to families. Grandma always calls Junior, who later on calls Madge and MIdge...
The second thing that they could do with this information would be illegal, but worth thinking about. Let's say, hypothetically that NSA was able and willing to monitor the raw traffic from all American phone calls. Well, then the biggest problem would be how to make sense of all the information and how to pick which calls to surreptitiously listen to, because if it was too wide-spread, someone would blow the whistle to the newspapers (which happened anyway). So what you might do would be to use the call logs to pick the exact time and numbers of call that you were willing to take a chance and transcribe. This approach would allow them to use a very small number of analysts and a few computers, increasing the chances that they could keep it secret.
EIther way, these records are a major threat to privacy and clearly beyond any laws authorizing NSA to conduct surveillance. It will be interesting to watch General Hayden's confirmation hearings...
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The Washington Post just released the results of a quickie poll claiming that 61% of the population are okay with this kind of domestic espionage because it fights terrorism.
I claim that a 500 person poll is a ridiculous way to create a headline news story and nobody understands the situation yet, let alone what can be gained from analyzing this information. This is a good example of media irresponsiblity...by running a story based on a limited polling sample of an uninformed group with a story that doesn't even have details yet, they lend support to the program before most people even know what it is. The Post headline is "Most Americans Support NSA's Efforts".
Posted on May 12, 2006
