More Details of the NSA's Social Network Analysis 367
mrogers writes "USA Today has a story describing how the NSA looks for suspicious calling patterns in the huge volumes of traffic data it collects. "Templates" such as a call from overseas followed by a flurry of domestic calls are used to identify leads, which are forwarded to the FBI for investigation. There have been complaints that low-quality leads are drawing agents away from other cases, and similar pattern-matching approaches have been found wanting in the past. Can data mining identify terrorists?"
Beside the point. (Score:5, Insightful)
If this wholesale data mining works, then the government will tout this success as justification for its acts. If it doesn't work, the government will complain that we're not letting them do enough to ensure our safety, and use the failure to justify even more outrageous violations of our privacy.
Whether it works or not, however, is beside the point. The point is: is it legal? Enough people have maintained that it is not to warrant a serious investigation into the matter.
Subsceptible to multiple attacks (Score:4, Insightful)
However the government has yet to catch up to the real world. I can disitalyl distribute the message through the internet using techniques that would not arouse suspicion, partivularly with al the online gaming of today.
Roger wilco anyone?
Attitude (Score:5, Insightful)
Aside from this being patently illegal, what bothers me is the cavalier attitude behind it, and the fact that it is already being abused to track down people who aren't terrorists, but who are merely doing their job to keep government entities like the NSA under some semblance of control - the journalists. There is no end to the manner in which this kind of information could be abused.
Raise it to orange (Score:5, Insightful)
"Oh great, I'll let the family over here know!"
*meanwhile, in the basement of a bunker somewhere*
"My God! It's nine eleven times ten thousand! Nine million one hundred and ten thousand!"
Terrorists? (Score:5, Insightful)
A country of 300 million people cannot have that many actual terrorists in it, even if you count domestic lunies like Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber in the category (or more accurately the next generation of bomb making lunies). Monitoring a sizable fraction of that 300m can't possibly be just about finding "terrorists" - for one thing it's a needle in a haystack, and for another the number of other uses/abuses of such a system are too many to count.
Bet good money that most of the people who are or will be advesely affected by this surveilance have little or no connection with terrorism. Even if there was once some noble intent of protecting people by finding monsters hidden among them, it won't just be used for that. Any time you have a major source of power in polical hands, you can bet on it being abused eventually - and what greater power over a domestic population is there than widespread spying without judicial oversight?
Simple answer? Kinda (Score:5, Insightful)
No. It can identify people who have calling patterns associated with terrorist activity, regardless of whether they are a terrorist or not.
Note that these calling patterns cannot be used to associate that person with a committed or planned crime in the normal data mining scenario.
Data mining is unreasonable search.
Now, I have no problem if they've got evidence of a crime or plan of a crime, and use known information to deduce who might else be involved. That's investigative work.
Data mining is speculative work, not investigative, so regardless of whether it *can* be used for speculative 'research' into the activity of American citizens, it *shouldn't* be.
Re:Beside the point. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's possible according to Yahoo (Score:4, Insightful)
They are operating under a logical fallacy. A flurry of calls after an overseas call does not mean the two are related in any way. Perhaps (and more likely than the person being a terrorist) is that the person which received the overseas call and then calls domestically is just relaying family information.
I know my family operated like this (although completely within the US). All you had to do was tell my grandmother something, and you could rest assured she'd spread the news to the rest of the family for you.
What ever happened to.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Those quotes are not just platitudes... they are *good ideas*.
Keep the canned patriotism, give me my rights, and I'll just take my chances.
Re:Beside the point. (Score:2, Insightful)
sensitivity vs specifcity (Score:2, Insightful)
Distinct Patterns in Hindsight (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a sister over-seas. If/when she calls anyone else in the family with news/updates/etc it will generate this pattern of many domestic calls as we have a large extended family who wants to know how she and her family is doing.
This does not mean we are terrorist, even though we might fit this "pattern" of suspicious calls. I bet calls to 900 numbers are suspicious and need lots of monitoring as well.
Many ways to abuse this.
False sense of security (Score:5, Insightful)
There was a local news story about a terrorism suspect who was picked up locally because of a tip from a flight school. Not from monitoring his phone calls, not by fingerprinting him when he came into the country, not by spy plane, satellite or any other whiz bang technology. Just a clerk at a airport counter in the middle of bf nowhere. And that's the sensor net that offers the best hope we have of combating terrorism. The clerk at the store, the landlord they rent from, the agent at the ticket counter, the hotel clerk, rental car company, bell hops, and neighbors. It's not depending on the government to keep us safe because they can't. Government is too big and too slow to respond to a ever changing threat landscape. Had we not spent the last five years alienating the muslim and mid-eastern communities in this country and abusing the few Arab allies we have in the mid-east, we might have been able to develop a community network that would have been effective and inexpensive (in relative terms).
No one seriously believes oceans can defend us, just like no one can seriously believe all the invasive technology being loosed on the people paying the bills is going to be any more effective.
It's all really quite insane.
Re:Quick, Look the Other Way! (Score:5, Insightful)
So, your choices for every election are between media coalitions. Which generally means that each of the major US parties supports slightly differing sections of the economy--service sector for the Democrats, production for the Republicans. That's the major difference.
Now, armed resistance is ridiculous when the government has billions of dollars of military equipment. And other technological countermeasures will likely prove ineffective in a short period of time.
Disarm them. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What ever happened to.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Pipe Dreams (Score:5, Insightful)
America's data set on terrorism is in the single digits, and the data they do have is only partially complete. This means the only system that can be programmed is a set of user-created rules that "flag" questionable behavior. The solution is a poor one and will only improve our chances at detection by a fraction of a percent. (Seems a huge price to pay for privacy trampling to me.)
In order to detect terrorism on American soil effectively, we'd need a larger data set. Otherwise we're just attempting to reverse engineer a process that essentially defines itself as dynamic enough to avoid detection. We'd need a frequent source of terrorism that we could derive models and nets off of. The immediate source that comes to mind is Iraq. If I were in charge of the NSA program, I think the best course of action would be to harness the call-traffic (satellite and domestic), email activity and other "data" that precedes suicide bombers (or other known acts of terrorism) in Iraq. Using this data you could train a system to recognize similarities in America. Short of that, anything the NSA is trying is a crap shoot.
No. Freeing up lines of communication, preparing quick and actionable responses to warnings, and better general population awareness are probably more effective than grabbing a billion pieces of data and sifting through it for answers. It's impossible for a human to know what to look for, and until the NSA comes clean in what it's actualy doing, there's no justification for stomping out the few freedoms we still have. There are better alternatives out there that can be done with the help of the community and still preserve the integrity of our privacy.
Re:What ever happened to.... (Score:1, Insightful)
What ever happened to "Live free or die", "Give me liberty or give me death", or "Those who are willing to sacrifice their basic liberties to assure their security deserve neither."?
The people who said those things died a long time ago, and their descendants value the ability to watch television, eat McDonalds and shop at Walmart much more than any abstract concept of freedom. If you want to know what the American Dream has turned into, switch on your television. Perhaps American Idol, which is literally based around the country idolising people not for their intelligence or their contribution to humanity, but for their looks and ability to carry a tune.
Keep the canned patriotism, give me my rights, and I'll just take my chances.
"Give me my rights"? Rights are not something you ask for, they are something you always have and must defend. What have you done to defend them?
Re:Raise it to orange (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple answer (Score:4, Insightful)
No.
But it can identify people with large extended families who have relatives overseas and get an important call about a death in the family, notify all their North American relatives, and then have government agents show up on their door.
Every single pattern-based terrorist screening method I have heard about sounds like something dreamed up in an air-conditioned office by some dork who never gets out very much and thinks all people are basically like him (and anyone who isn't ought to be subject to government investigation.)
Hanging around public buildings taking pictures? Must be a terrorist. As opposed to say, just interested in taking pictures of public buildings because modern-day monumental architecture happens to turn you on.
Want to learn to fly a 747 but don't have any interest in a career as a pilot? Must be a terrorist. Unless you happen to be fascinated by aircraft and think that a few weeks of flight school would give you bragging rights to die for at your local RC club.
Like to pay with cash, even for purchases in the thousands like furniture or maybe a car? Must be a terrorist. Or maybe you don't qualify for a chequing account, or are just a little bit paranoid, or just don't fucking feel like doing anything else.
These sorts of unvalidated, non-empirical, "feels like the right thing to me", ad hoc, imaginary "patterns of suspicious activity" are a major threat to freedom because they demonize and may even criminalize deviancy from the norm. It is a characteristic of unfree societies that deviancy from the norm is not just looked at asscance by the majority of the population, but is viewed as grounds for suspicion of the most heinious acts.
Furthermore, such datamining solutions are not able to identify terrorists reliably even when they have all kinds of intelligence data entered into them. A report on the chilling-named MATRIX [fas.org] system indicates that the system was only able to identify 5 of the original 9/11 hijackers in a retrospective test, a 75% false negative rate, and it further identifed 120,000 other Americans who had a "high terrorism factor." Supposedly "scores of arrests" resulted from that list, although no one knows what the arrests were for or how many of those were sucessfully prosecuted. The odds are most of them were for drug possession charges that were laid as a result of the increased scrutiny certain individuals got by virtue of wholey baseless suspicions of terrorism. But let us grant 60 successful prosecutions for terrorist-related activities. That's a false positive rate of over 99.9%
And that was when the system was loaded with specific intelligence data, which is no longer the case.
Given the complete failure of such systems to detect terrorists in retrospective studies, and the horrifically high false positive rate, and the chilling effect such programs have on the freedom to be different, it is very hard to believe that their real purpose is to spy on Americans and impose a high degree of conformity on American society.
Re:Terrorist activities (Score:3, Insightful)
Terrorists are very well funded if we are to believe the crap that spews forth from our leaders so why dont they take an approach that is different from normal?
Bin laden can buy all his terrorists a SIP Wifi Phone and use Free World Dialup to keep in touch or simply dial a direct IP. Throw away prepay cellphones are easy to come by, why dont these terrorists buy a "boost mobile" and simply buy only a single airtime card and then throw the whole thing away when done and use a different unit/carrier? and to hell with phones, meet in second life or some other online pc/mac based communication system.
Either the terrorists are far more stupid than the NSA and FBI (yes, amazing to even think about) agents and leaders are or the NSA is simply using this whole Terrorism thing as a front to try and gain tighter control over american citizens.
I am betting firmly on the latter.
That's not the question.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The question should be is it consistent with America's values? Or is it moral? And I think the answer is a resounding NO!
The problem when you ask about legality is that you get legal opinions with obscure analysis that circumvents the broader question of whether America SHOULD do this.
It's alot like the debate surrounding our system of legalized bribery (except we call it lobbying). "Oh, they paid for a plane trip, let's make those illegal." The debates center around the legal technicalities, but largely ignore the larger problem of targeted contributions directly affecting specific votes and the immoral culture of lobbying.
Surveillance vs Civil Liberties (Score:2, Insightful)
If we assume that the people at the NSA and other spy agencies are smart enough to know this too, then one has to ask what are they really trying to do.
The answer is that monitoring known actors (such as political dissidents) who are members of known groups works well with these techniques.
Here's my little essay on the subject (with some historical examples thrown in): http://robertdfeinman.com/society/surveillance_vs_ liberty.html [robertdfeinman.com]
The bottom line is that secret police functions rapidly become tools for suppression of domestic dissent.
Re:Quick, Look the Other Way! (Score:5, Insightful)
you have to be kidding! you're claiming that the media covered Nader because he could not have won, but Badnarik could have won and so they didn't cover him? they didn't cover Badnarik because even if he was on the ballot in 150 states, he still could not have won. i agree - its a poor reason to avoid covering Badnarik and his party's ideas, but lets get serious about the reasons here.
Re:Terrorist activities (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you're right.
I have a friend whose dad emigrated from Iraq over fifty years ago. The stateside family regularly calls the Iraqi-born family members who live in Iraq to say hello and catch up on current events - like how many schools have been painted that week or whether the electricity is on this month, or whether the price of gas in Baghdad is higher than in the U.S. honestly, I don't know what they talk about. But they do talk.
Now, I have beers with my friend once or twice a week. We e-mail and call each other occasionally. I'm only separated by one phone call from his relatives in Iraq.
You'd better bet my name is in one of these FBI "leads", and it's entirely inappropriate. Maybe they're checking out my surfing habits, too, because there's been a long stall lately whenever I check Slashdot's front page...hope I don't go to your page and involuntarily make you part of the conspiracy.
At the top of the tree is my friend's family, calling relatives in Iraq. At the bottom, there's me, a critic of this administration. We're all connected by a single phone call from one "suspect" party to a "suspect" place. And yet I have no affiliations with terrorists somehow.
I guess the guy with the microphone in his I.P.A. is the Feeb. See you at the pub!
Re:It's possible according to Yahoo (Score:3, Insightful)
There is a difference in that one is expressly and well-established to be unconstitutional, and the other is merely of dubious constitutionality and prohibited by statute (or, at least, the telcos turning over the information si generally prohibited by statute.)
OTOH, they are both the same in that they involve the gathering of information in which individuals have a legitimate, and recognized-in-law expectation of privacy, and therefore should not be done by the government in a free country except with a showing that there is some credible reason to expect evidence to be uncovered by the examination of the information associated with a particular target.
There is an easy solution which was known by our founders -- to intrude into the private information of a citizen, the executive takes specific information justifying the particular inquiry to a court, and gets a warrant if indeed that information shows probable cause.
Re:What ever happened to.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Disarm them. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The strength of weak links... (Score:5, Insightful)
The trend in terrorism lately is decentralization: the guys who carried out the Madrid train bombings were home-grown, were not known terrorists, and were not previoiusly involved in any high level attacks or meetings. They didn't show up on anyone's radar precisely because they didn't fit any profile, nor would they be found with traffic pattern analysis. Add to this the recent news that the AQ higher ups have ceased using satellite or cel phones and you have the basic problem with asymetrical warfare, one which the White House and DoD refuse to learn: you can't fight a guy wearing a suicide vest with satellites and computers, and you can't find a loosely organized, ad hoc group of people by looking for organized cells. The top down model of terrorism is dead, and it seems to be the only thing we're still looking for.
What we need, and what the White House and DoD are steadfastly refusing to develop, is old-fashioned HUMINT, human intelligence. We need speakers of Arab in all of the various dialects, we need people schooled in Middle Eastern politics, history, religion and socities, and we need to get people with Middle Eastern backgrounds into the intelligence services and up the command chain. One of the reasons the CIA was as efficient as it was in the 60s and 70s was the large number of working agents from countries in which they were working. Gust Avrakotos [wikipedia.org] was such an effective agent in Greece and elsewhere because he spoke the native languages and knew the local customs. He wasn't viewing the space by satellite from DC. He was in the mix.
Here endeth the rant.
A Great Way to Identify Reporters, Too (Score:4, Insightful)
1) A Pakistani developer starts an interesting FOSS project.
2) I test a copy and like it. He then calls me or I call him for a phone interview.
3) My next step is to call a bunch of sources in the U.S. and elsewhere, ask what they think of the software.
So with no family or friends in Pakistan, I am suddenly a potential terrorist threat by NSA standards. Uh huh.
It doesn't need to be a story about software, either. One about anti-terrorism activities could generate a similar call pattern.
On the other hand, I suppose that by current U.S. government standards, any journalist who makes a lot of calls to verify a story, instead of being a Good Little Boy and sticking to "official sources," is nearly as dangerous as a terrorist, anyway.
(sigh)
Self-defeating (Score:2, Insightful)
You just can't gather that much data from that many sources and not expect that someone will find out. Once the well organized terrorists know that the data is being gathered then they'll simply change their calling habits. These are smart folks, they'll figure out ways to obfuscate their calling patterns (use internet methods, call from payphones and hotel rooms, make only local calls, route calls through non-cooperating foreign phone networks using e.g. 3-way calling, etc).
But the government will still have the data and the only people left vulnerable to the database will be non-terrorists.
The smart people at the NSA must have known this when they designed the program.
usenet anyone??? blogs anyone??? (Score:3, Insightful)
Similarly with blog comments... a lot of it looks like spam, but it could be disguised commands, and it can be seen by people using search engines so there's a disconnect (cutout) between the poster and the recipient. All the reader would have to do would be to search on an innocent phrase agreed between the poster and the recipient and then view the cache of the page that matches that content...
they could be using Slashdot right now to coordinate the next big one...
Re:Terrorist activities (Score:4, Insightful)
In the mid-90s, I took a course in Introduction to International Terrorism. The professor's master's thesis was on terrorist funding resources in the United States. He told us the story of how his thesis came together and the argument he got into with his advisor.
He was studying somewhere in the Mid-West, I forget where. Anyway, the thesis ended up as a sort of bet: how active is terrorist funding in the following X Mid-Western cities? In the end, he found that several big-named groups (in the 1980s) were actively receving funds in those cities. He said his research was illuminating as to just how well-funded these groups were based only on activity in the U.S., not to mention other potential sources.
So, while you may want to discount what the government says about terrorist funding, I say to you that without hearing this from the government I can assure you that terrorists are at least as well-funded as the government would have you believe. Just because the government says it does not make it false.
Re:Quick, Look the Other Way! (Score:3, Insightful)
The American revolutionaries at the time of the War for Independence were severely outgunned, outmanned, outequipped and out-trained compared to their contemporary British counterparts.
Guess which side one?
Just what the hell are they looking for? (Score:2, Insightful)
Secret database??? They snatched records from the phone company.
Calls coming into the country from Pakistan, Afghanistan or the Middle East, for example, are flagged by NSA computers if they are followed by a flood of calls from the number that received the call to other U.S. numbers.
So if one of our servicepersons calls his/her worried mother to reassure her that he/she is ok after a particularly hostile engagement and she wants to let the rest of the family know, which one is the terrorist?
The spy agency then checks the numbers against databases of phone numbers linked to terrorism, the officials say. Those include numbers found during searches of computers or cellphones that belonged to terrorists.
If they find something suspicious, they check to see if it's connected to a known terrorist phone number? If they already have a list of known terrorist phone numbers, then just what the hell are they looking for?
Just to play devil's advocate... (Score:2, Insightful)
Before you answer, please set aside the "any data mining is wrong" mantra...
To answer my own question, I don't believe for a minute that this specific example is even a small fraction of the number games that they play with the data. That's exactly why you folks complaining about the risk posed by your Aunt Zelda's goiter surgery phone calls have NOT been bothered by the NSA. They're smarter than that.
This question has been posed several times by conservative journalists: if they're doing such a lousy job, don't you find it curious that there has NOT been another successful attack in four and a half years, despite repeated hate-filled threats from Bin Laden and others like him? Either we're just lucky, or DHS has something going right.
Re:Attitude (Score:2, Insightful)
The U.S. is a constitutional democratic republic - it is an indirect democracy, yes, but one where the rightful powers of the government are limited by prior arangement, to prevent mob rule from trampling on citizen's rights.
I.e., even if in the grip of some mass hysteria, 90% of the population thinks it's ok to do something, that doesn't make it legal. If that 90% maintains that belief, then eventually the Constitution will be changed, but that process takes long enough for cooler heads to usually prevail.
ABSOLUTELY, data mining can identify terrorists (Score:3, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Danger [wikipedia.org]
Instead of the government trying to cover up the success of Able Danger, it should be initiating twenty or so Able Danger-like data mining programs.
Re:Terrorist activities (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah, but what you fail to realize (begin sarcasm) is that clearly there is a link between terrotists and those critical of this administration (end sarcasm).
The prevailing attitude seems to be that it's unpatriotic to criticise them, and if you're a foreign person criticizing their actions, then you must be a terrorist. There's no middle ground for many.
I'm glad my passport has expired, now I have an excuse to tell anyone who wants me to go the US to PFO. I'm tired of the bullshit. I used to hold the US constitution and system of government as an ideal, and one which wouldn't fall prey to this sort of crap. However, I'm being proven wrong on a weekly basis. Now they're just trying very hard to completely undermine all of those elements.
The terrorists have not only won, but played into the hands of those who have always wanted to do this.
Re:Disarm them. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The strength of weak links... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Terrorist activities (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're in the UK, the next time you need a passport, you're going to get a biometric thingamajigger, instead of a paper book with your photo, a barcode and some holograms.
I'd suggest, to anyone in a country which has decided biometric (or RFID) passports are The Next Step (tm), that you renew your passport before they make the switch.
Re:Simple answer? Kinda (Score:3, Insightful)
Not at all. I think you need to research your rights better. The cop could stop you, he could ask to search your car, but would not be allowed to search it without a warrant unless you gave him permission -- same with your personal effects (like what's in your pockets). If he smelled marijuana or gunpowder residue, or saw blood, then he'd have grounds. But it's absolutely scary to me that people would believe that wearing a ski mask is grounds to be searched.
If you're not even aware of your rights, how do you know when they are taken from you?
Re:Just to play devil's advocate... (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, there is also the "we're at war" aspect. Why should terrorists go to the trouble of trying to kill Americans in the US when there are a whole bunch of Americans in Iraq that are much easier to target. You could just as easily argue that the lack of attacks over the last several years is due not to better security policies at home, but the fact that terrorists are occupied killing Americans abroad.
On the other hand, you have some fairly strong evidence to suggest that our current security policy really isn't any more secure than it used to be. Just last month, auditors tried to sneak weapons onboard airplanes, and succeeded in the vast majority of attempts, despite consciously making the weapons easy to discover. At the same time, you had the Israeli guys audit our airplane security, and conclude that it was "not so much a system for protecting Americans as it was a system for annoying them."
Re:Quick, Look the Other Way! (Score:3, Insightful)
His winning the election (or even being allowed to attend the presidential debates) would have been disruptive to their entrenched interests, so the mass media only presented the two candidates which were known quantities.
Chip H.
Re:Quick, Look the Other Way! (Score:1, Insightful)
- In a move that will become quite familiar to future Americans, France claims a win even though the English colonists saw far more action. This is later known as "de Gaulle Syndrome", and leads to the Second Rule of French Warfare; "France only wins when America does most of the fighting."
Re:Quick, Look the Other Way! (Score:3, Insightful)