NSA Wiretap Tips: Lame

There are a ton of prob­lems with data min­ing for poten­tial ene­mies of the state. Privacy is one, of course. But another is its ques­tion­able util­ity. It doesn’t make you a jihadist, because you’ve e-​​mailed Chris Allbritton, who inter­views gueril­las some­times. Or because you’ve said “bomb” and “train­wreck” in the same over­seas call. Just look at all the hijinks with our “no-​​fly” lists, to see what an impre­cise sci­ence we’re talk­ing about here.
So I guess I’m not sur­prised to learn from tomorrow’s New York Times that the NSA’s domes­tic eaves­drop­ping project — which some seem to think is awfully sim­i­lar to a rather infa­mous data min­ing pro­gram — pro­duced a “flood” of tips, and “vir­tu­ally all of [which] led to dead ends or inno­cent Americans.”

More than a dozen cur­rent and for­mer law enforce­ment and coun­tert­er­ror­ism offi­cials, includ­ing some in the small cir­cle who knew of the secret eaves­drop­ping pro­gram and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the tor­rent of tips led them to few poten­tial ter­ror­ists inside the coun­try they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from coun­tert­er­ror­ism work they viewed as more pro­duc­tive.
“We’d chase a num­ber, find it’s a school­teacher with no indi­ca­tion they’ve ever been involved in inter­na­tional ter­ror­ism — case closed,” said one for­mer F.B.I. offi­cial, who was aware of the pro­gram and the data it gen­er­ated for the bureau. “After you get a thou­sand num­bers and not one is turn­ing up any­thing, you get some frus­tra­tion…“
Officials who were briefed on the N.S.A. pro­gram said the agency col­lected much of the data passed on to the F.B.I. as tips by trac­ing phone num­bers in the United States called by sus­pects over­seas, and then by fol­low­ing the domes­tic num­bers to other num­bers called. In other cases, lists of phone num­bers appeared to result from the agency’s com­put­er­ized scan­ning of com­mu­ni­ca­tions com­ing in and out of the coun­try for names and key­words that might be of inter­est. The delib­er­ate blur­ring of the source of the tips caused some frus­tra­tion among those who had to fol­low up.
F.B.I. field agents, who were not told of the domes­tic sur­veil­lance pro­grams, com­plained they often were given no infor­ma­tion about why names or num­bers had come under sus­pi­cion. A for­mer senior pros­e­cu­tor, who was famil­iar with the eaves­drop­ping pro­grams, said intel­li­gence offi­cials turn­ing over the tips “would always say that we had infor­ma­tion whose source we can’t share, but it indi­cates that this per­son has been com­mu­ni­cat­ing with a sus­pected Al Qaeda oper­a­tive.” He said, “I would always won­der, what does ‘sus­pected’ mean?”…
Aside from the direc­tor, F.B.I. offi­cials did not ques­tion the legal sta­tus of the tips, assum­ing that N.S.A. lawyers had approved. They were more con­cerned about the qual­ity and quan­tity of the mate­r­ial, which pro­duced “moun­tains of paper­work” that was often more like raw data than con­ven­tional inves­tiga­tive leads.
“It affected the F.B.I. in the sense that they had to devote so many resources to track­ing every sin­gle one of these leads, and, in my expe­ri­ence, they were all dry leads,” the for­mer senior pros­e­cu­tor said.

Of course, any wide-​​spread inves­ti­ga­tion is going to mean a ton of dead ends. But, under nor­mal cir­cum­stances, if there’s a prob­lem with the infor­ma­tion you get, you can go back to your sources, ask more ques­tions, hit them up again. If all you’re get­ting is a list of names and num­bers, how­ever, there’s no follow-​​up pos­si­ble. No chance to pri­or­i­tize the infor­ma­tion. No way of telling whether this run of the algo­rithm is actu­ally going to work, this time.
UPDATE 01/​07/​06 12:03AM: Does it strike any­body else as odd that the NSA’s “unof­fi­cial ambas­sador,” author James Bamford, is now suing to stop the domes­tic spy­ing pro­gram? Do you think he’d be doing that with­out the tacit approval of at least some of his con­tacts within the agency?
UPDATE 01/​01/​06 12:29 PM: Al Gore was one of my least-​​favorite pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates of all time. But he’s got this NSA thing nailed.

President Lincoln, of course, sus­pended habeas cor­pus dur­ing the Civil War, and some of the worst abuses prior to those of the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion were com­mit­ted by President Wilson dur­ing and after World War I, with the noto­ri­ous red scare and “Palmer Raids.“
…But in each of these cases through­out American his­tory, when the con­flict and tur­moil sub­sided, our nation recov­ered its equi­lib­rium and absorbed the lessons learned in a recur­ring cycle of excess and regret.
But there are rea­sons for con­cern this time around that con­di­tions may be chang­ing so that this cycle may not repeat itself. For one thing, we have for decades been wit­ness­ing the slow and steady accu­mu­la­tion of pres­i­den­tial power.…
A sec­ond rea­son to believe that we may be expe­ri­enc­ing some­thing new, out­side that his­tor­i­cal cycle, is that we are, after all, told by this admin­is­tra­tion that the war foot­ing upon which he has tried to place the coun­try is going to last, in their phrase, “for the rest of our lives.“
And so we are told that the con­di­tions of national threat that have been used by other pres­i­dents to jus­tify arro­ga­tions of power will in this case per­sist in near per­pe­tu­ity.
Third, we need to be keenly aware of the star­tling advances in the sophis­ti­ca­tion of eaves­drop­ping and sur­veil­lance tech­nolo­gies with their capac­ity to eas­ily sweep up and ana­lyze enor­mous quan­ti­ties of infor­ma­tion and then mine it for intel­li­gence. And this adds sig­nif­i­cant vul­ner­a­bil­ity to the pri­vacy and free­dom of enor­mous num­bers of inno­cent peo­ple at the same time as the poten­tial power of those tech­nolo­gies grows.
Those tech­nolo­gies do have the poten­tial for shift­ing the bal­ance of power between the appa­ra­tus of the state and the free­dom of the indi­vid­ual in ways that are both sub­tle and pro­found.
Don’t mis­un­der­stand me. The threat of addi­tional ter­ror strikes is real and the con­certed efforts by ter­ror­ists to acquire weapons of mass destruc­tion does indeed cre­ate a real imper­a­tive to exer­cise the pow­ers of the exec­u­tive branch with swift­ness and agility.
Moreover, there is an in fact an inher­ent power con­ferred by the Constitution to any pres­i­dent to take uni­lat­eral action when nec­es­sary to pro­tect the nation from a sud­den and imme­di­ate threat. And it is sim­ply not pos­si­ble to pre­cisely define in legal­is­tic terms exactly when that power is appro­pri­ate and when it is not.
But the exis­tence of that inher­ent power can­not be used to jus­tify a gross and exces­sive power grab last­ing for many years and pro­duc­ing a seri­ous imbal­ance in the rela­tion­ship between the exec­u­tive and the other two branches of government.

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