Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda. What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.
[...]But the Bush administration regards the N.S.A.'s ability to trace and analyze large volumes of data as critical to its expanded mission to detect terrorist plots before they can be carried out, officials familiar with the program say. Administration officials maintain that the system set up by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not give them the speed and flexibility to respond fully to terrorist threats at home. A former technology manager at a major telecommunications company said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the industry have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists. "All that data is mined with the cooperation of the government and shared with them, and since 9/11, there's been much more active involvement in that area," said the former manager, a telecommunications expert who did not want his name or that of his former company used because of concern about revealing trade secrets.
[...]Several officials said that after President Bush's order authorizing the N.S.A. program, senior government officials arranged with officials of some of the nation's largest telecommunications companies to gain access to switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States' communications networks and international networks. The identities of the corporations involved could not be determined. The switches are some of the main arteries for moving voice and some Internet traffic into and out of the United States, and, with the Globalization of the telecommunications industry in recent years, many international-to-international calls are also routed through such American switches. One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at the N.S.A. said that to exploit its technological capabilities, the American government had in the last few years been quietly encouraging the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches. The growth of that transit traffic had become a major issue for the intelligence community, officials say, because it had not been fully addressed by 1970's-era laws and regulations governing the N.S.A. Now that foreign calls were being routed through switches on American soil, some judges and law enforcement officials regarded eavesdropping on those calls as a possible violation of those decades-old restrictions, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for domestic surveillance. MORE
Since the NSA role has expanded exponentially in the first few years of the 21st century, they would have to add exponentially to processes capacity. Rumors have it that in 1996 NSA Tordella Super-computing Factory held over 150 such super-computers. Between 2000 and 2003 US Government and military installations added at least 73 supercomputers. Meanwhile the DoD has built a super secure government only Internet called the Global Information Grid designed to instantaneously network together all of it's computer resources.
The new computer network web, called the Global Information Grid (GIG) will provide military commanders a "God's-eye view" of the battle. The GIG will enable real-time digital communication and data dissemination through a familiar technology, similar to the World Wide Web, anytime and anyplace, under any conditions, with requisite security. Amplifying the GIG's capabilities is the initiative the DoD's communications transformation is Global Information Grid Bandwidth Expansion (GIG-BE). According to the Defense Information Systems Agency website, the GIG-BE will create a ubiquitous bandwidth-available environment to improve national security intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and command and control information-sharing.
Presumably, this all means that the NSA has the capacity to analyze a great deal more of the information available to it. I would hazard a guess it is still unable to analyze all communications worldwide, just a huge chunk of it. In other words, I wouldn't joke around about issues that might be misinterpreted anywhere other than private face to face communications.
Steve Soto at The Left Coaster wonders if providers like SBC, Verizon, or Comcast might have an obligation to mention this in their Notice of Privacy Practices. I'm sure they can argue that such disclosure is allowed under the vaguely worded exclusion: "However, we do release customer information without involving you if disclosure is required by law or to protect the safety of customers, employees or property."
The evidence suggests emptywheel at The Next Hurrah is right:
Logic Lesson Number One: It is not possible to stay completely within the legal guidelines of the program, because NSA doesn't have the technical ability to guarantee they do so.
[...]Logic Lesson Number Two: The search criteria used on this program are not stringent enough to prevent wiretapping innocent people.
Given the mega terabytes of information that have to be filtered for keywords, there is no way they could sort it in any meaningful way. Sorting usually requires going through all of the information once just to sort, then again to look for the keyword. That would cut CPU capacity at least in half and at least double the size of needed data storage capacity. It's a practical impossibility. They are filtering everything, targeting particular switches based on changing criteria, pulling all keyword containing information for additional analysis and human viewing. Protecting our privacy rights, if they were so inclined, would have to be one of the final steps in analysis where the human operator has been trained to assume there is something of value, unless proven otherwise. That's how a a innocent mom whose name and telephone number went into the Echelon database as a possible terrorist because she told a friend on the phone that her son had "bombed" in a school play. Big Brother IS watching everywhere. We just have to trust the Bush Administration has our best interests in mind. NOT!
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