

Whistleblower: NSA Targeted Journalists, Snooped on All U.S. Communications - markup
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/01/nsa-whistleblow.html

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jeremyw
It would be nice if these articles (especially in net-savvy Wired) included
computability and physical access arguments defining the current limits of
practical internet surveillance, scoping a bit the unbounded oh-my-god-
they're-reading-everything. Distributed growth beats centralized (observer)
growth, no matter how many cooperative agents (AT&T, etc). i.e. what's the
current sampling ceiling?

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bprater
I suspect this is the beginning of many things we will learn now that the Bush
administration is out of office.

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Dilpil
Can as many things possibly come out after bush than came out during bush?

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anamax
Does anyone believe that they're really going to stop? How about that that it
didn't start during the Clinton administration (if the capability existed)?

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anamax
I forgot that the Kennedy administration was especially fond of govt
surveillance. I'd be surprised if Nixon wasn't.

Is there any reason to believe that a govt won't do surveillance that it has
the capability to do?

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justindz
People in the know kept all of their phone calls to 2 minutes and 1 second,
minimum.

I'm hoping that was a purely hypothetical example, or else the signal to noise
ratio must have been absurd.

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daniel-cussen
Boot stamping on human face etc.

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DanielBMarkham
_Tice said the NSA analyzed metadata to determine which communication would be
collected._

The analysis of metadata -- signals intelligence -- is NOT covered under the
consitution. Likewise node analysis or lots of other forms of mathematical
intelligence gathering.

If the NSA can string seven communications nodes together to hone in on an
accurate communications channel for terrorists to their
sponsors/members/operatives, then they are doing their job. This critical work
should not be lumped in with everything else.

Now the actual recording of calls and _data_ of communications, as opposed to
_metadata_ \-- that's another animal entirely.

Instead of grandstanding (and I'm a liberarian, so it's really hard not to
grandstand on this one), we should try to take the concept of foreign
intelligence into the world of IM, SMS, E-mail, and all the other new forms of
data which live all over the world (including on U.S. servers)

I'm not making apologies for NSA. I'm simply pointing out that they are
charged with doing an important job. They might be screwing it up, but that
doesn't make the job go away. The last thing we want is another 1970s where
Congress so crippled the intelligence agencies based on previous bad behavior
that we were mostly blind in terms on HUMINT up until 9-11. Politicians and
media outlets have a tendency to try to make audiences as emotional as
possible -- which is exactly not what we want to do with something as
important as this.

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tkhggauwfawvyk
Traffic analysis is a GREATER danger to innocent bystanders than recording
calls, because it is all hearsay and unproven. if they tap my phone calling
for a takeaway curry then it's obvious I'm innocent. If they just log that I
call that number and later somebody they are 'watching' calls that same
restaurant (because their relative works there) then I am secretly linked to
that person in some database - this doesn't get examine in court - but I now
have 'links to terrorists'

~~~
DanielBMarkham
You're making two mistakes.

One: you are confusing criminal law with intelligence. "hearsay" and
"unproven" are criminal law concepts, used when the state wishes to deprive
you of some of your rights, such as when you are being investigated or
prosecuted.

Two: you are representing "link to terrorist" as some sort of boolean
condition when in fact it's multi-dimensional. EVERYBODY has links to
terrorists. I call the neighborhood pizza store who has an owner that SMSs
PeeWee Herman on a regular basis who visits the web site of a known supporter
of Hamas. We're all linked to terrorists -- it's like the seven degrees of
Kevin Bacon concept. The point of meta-analysis is to take all of that random
noise and gather meaningful meta-data in order to pursue.

Once the government becomes interested in me, personally, we start moving from
intelligence to crime -- assuming I am a U.S. citizen. If I am a foreign
citizen, then it's simply plain old intelligence-gathering.

The weirdness is that multi-node transports now can cover areas of both
criminal law and intelligence gathering, but the laws are all written for one
or the other. There has to be some allowance for work in-between the two
concepts.

We have some precedence. It's legal, for instance, for authorities to search
your trash without a warrant.There is no presumption of privacy when using
computers owned by somebody else, such as your employer.

There's a lot of legal work to be done in these areas. I want the government
completely out of my life, but that ain't happening. In any society in which a
strong contingent wants to control and shape every form of energy I use (to
prevent global warming), then we've gone beyond the old days and are in new
territory. The game now, from a libertarian viewpoint, is damage control.

EDIT: I can see where we might have a misunderstanding. When you're concerned
that tracking the types and messages from you is infringing on your rights,
you're assuming that the government can identify you. I have no idea how NSA
is doing its work, but the idea of signals intelligence is that people are
just nodes. The association of the data with your identity is another subject
entirely. (Of course, attributes about the node, such as location, occupation,
religious history, etc. are fair game. Just not identification. Who you
actually are is irrelevant.)

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fcjqbuvjxpxml
Yes I do know how it works - my company produces the software that does this
for your bank, your credit card and a bunch of 3letter agencies (hence the
one-shot username). What we hand over is a big list of names that are 'linked'
(for whatever degree of linked they asked for) to the
terrorist/criminal/transaction in question.

The tenuous definition of'match' required by some of these customers is scary,
two arabic surnames beginning with Al are assumed to have a 50% match for one
agency, all chinese with the surname 'Ng' are the same person according to
another!

I'm sure that somewhere in military intelligence somebody understands sifting
for real patterns in this. But compared to the number of people who get
refused loans, get extra security at airports or listed as 'persons of
interest' the next time a child is abducted - all on the basis of a 6th degree
of separation.

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DanielBMarkham
_I'm sure that somewhere in military intelligence somebody understands sifting
for real patterns in this._

Then this guy needs to revamp the system. It sounds like it is horribly
broken.

Having said that, you have to look at the cost-benefit ratio of both false
negatives and false positives for any kind of discrimination engine. Life
isn't black and white. If Fred Smith has a nuke and is somewhere overseas (and
we know he'll use his real name), I'm more than happy to carefully watch all
the Fred Smiths overseas that are making any kind of travel or shipping
arrangements, civil liberties have nothing to do with it. That is traditional
intelligence, as it applies to foreign citizens.

And this is where the conversation breaks down. Criminal law has no allowance
for any kind of false positives (it is not tolerable for anybody to go to jail
when they are innocent). Intelligence, on the other hand, is always dealing
with probabilities -- you never expect to know fully one way or the other.

There's a fundamental incompatibility with both systems such that when they
interface the language doesn't work any more. It's not going to work to try to
force the concepts of one world on the other. We have to have a reasonable
discussion somewhere in the middle.

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jderick
This needs to stop.

