Spies Like US
Sunday :: February 26, 2006
NSA Goes Shopping at Silicon Valley for Data Mining ToolsWhatever the outcome of Bush’s warrantless NSA surveillance program, it seems clear that government surveillance of our communications and even our social networks is only going to increase. The New York Times reports on recent “shopping trips” by NSA officials to Silicon Valley to purchase new data-mining tools.
On the wish list, according to several venture capitalists who met with the officials, were an array of technologies that underlie the fierce debate over the Bush administration’s anti-terrorist eavesdropping program: computerized systems that reveal connections between seemingly innocuous and unrelated pieces of information. The tools they were looking for are new, but their application would fall under the well-established practice of data mining: using mathematical and statistical techniques to scan for hidden relationships in streams of digital data or large databases.
Here’s a graphic of how it can work with prisoners. Only the NSA isn’t interested in prisoners. They are interested in the rest of us.
Data mining is already being used in a diverse array of commercial applications — whether by credit card companies detecting and stopping fraud as it happens, or by insurance companies that predict health risks. As a result, millions of Americans have become enmeshed in a vast and growing data web that is constantly being examined by a legion of Internet-era software snoops.
Technology industry executives and government officials said that the intelligence agency systems take such techniques further, applying software analysis tools now routinely used by law enforcement agencies to identify criminal activities and political terrorist organizations that would otherwise be missed by human eavesdroppers.
And while we thought the Total Information Awareness program was dead,
…the legislation [terminating it] provided a specific exemption for “processing, analysis and collaboration tools for counterterrorism foreign intelligence.”
Then there’s AT&T’s Daytona Project, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation believes was used in Bush’s warrantless NSA program. Located in Kansas, the Daytona Project is a database with more than 1 trillion phone call records, going back over a decade. EFF has sued AT&T over its cooperation with the NSA spying–you can read about the lawsuit’s allegations here.
Yet, the NSA has even more sophisticated tools at its disposal.
The National Security Agency has invested billions in computerized tools for monitoring phone calls around the world — not only logging them, but also determining content — and more recently in trying to design digital vacuum cleaners to sweep up information from the Internet.
Last September, the N.S.A. was granted a patent for a technique that could be used to determine the physical location of an Internet address — another potential category of data to be mined. The technique, which exploits the tiny time delays in the transmission of Internet data, suggests the agency’s interest in sophisticated surveillance tasks like trying to determine where a message sent from an Internet address in a cybercafe might have originated.
I think it’s time we all learned more about data-mining and the warrantless spying the Government is conducting on Americans. Here are some links to get you started:
EFF’s NSA Warrantless Domestic Surveillance page
Eavesdropping 101: What the NSA Can Do.
U.S. Intelligence and Security Agencies
Declassified NSA Documents[Graphic created exclusively for TalkLeft by CL.]
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