Phony Phone Foolishness
I am stunned by the lunatics elected by the uninformed (thank the media) scream bloody murder about the latest NSA canard. The 12th imam is on his way (at least ah-mad-mini-me seems to think so), the worldwide Islamic extremist movement means to take us out, and Hitler part II is playing with nuclear weaponry. To better understand the latest phone kerfuffle, Ben wrote the following ;
Traffic Analysis
As a public service, I thought I would shed some light on what it is the NSA is doing with all those phone records. It’s not what the media implies it is. For starters, what they are not doing: NSA analysts are not sitting at their consoles with their headphones listening to your conversation. They don’t know about your mistress, how smart your son is, who Emily is going out with, your dinner plans, why you hate your boss, and they don’t care. They don’t have the time to bother because:
1) They have phone records, not taped conversations.
2) Even if they had conversations, they wouldn’t have a fraction of the analysts needed to listen to more than a tiny, tiny subset of conversations, and they cannot waste their time on your personal issues.
In fact, they don’t even know what number you called, when, and where. Yes, this
information exists, but buried inside machines. No one “knows” it, just as a librarian does not “know” a fact merely because it exists in a book on a shelf in a library. And this information will stay buried, unknown, secure and personal unless something very unusual turns up.
So here is what is being done: traffic analysis. This is an arcane art-science, in which the analyst, or more precisely, in this case, the algorithms designed by analysts, glean information not from the conversations themselves, but from the patterns those communications generate in time and space. Some of it is obvious and self evident: you can tell the difference in communications patterns between passing information and coordinating an activity, because the coordination conversations will have short return messages initiated by the non-node elements, while information is generally passed to a node from only one element, and then distributed to a larger group by the node.
After 9-11, a lot of people talked about “connecting the dots”. This is connecting the dots. This is using a computer to pluck patterns out of the virtual “information space” in which people communicate, without actually monitoring the information itself. Of course, should a particular pattern be red flagged by an algorithm, it could lead to actual monitoring.
In a New Century kind of way, it’s not unlike scanning the airspace for signs of enemy bombers- something taken for granted back in the Cold War but inappropriate today, now that we have an enemy that doesn’t bother to maintain old fashioned conventional air forces. Today we have to scan information space for signs of enemy activity.
Exactly what can be gained from traffic analysis is highly classified for obvious reasons. Any enemy, aware that certain communications patterns meant certain things to analysts, would make an effort to change patterns, or send “false positives” to the analysts. The New York Times is aware of this too, and so would make every effort to get this information to terrorist groups and help them thwart intelligence analysts.
The people railing against this are still living with September 10th Mentalities. I’ve heard it over and over; it’s “Wrong” to gather intelligence unless there is a clear sign of law breaking. On 9-11, some of those hijackers hadn’t actually committed a felony UNTIL they took over the planes- what dots, then, were we supposed to connect? Traffic Analysis is dot connection at work. It is not wiretapping, it is not eavesdropping. No personal information comes into contact with another human being unless it is part of a very suspicious pattern.
Thanks Ben.
In other words, STFU already and start fighting the real war. BTW, most Americans agree.