NSA: Not So Tough?

Tomorrow’s edi­tions of Time and Newsweek put the NSA’s phone data­base on their cov­ers. Time’s story is emmi­nently skip­pable, if you’ve been fol­low­ing the story at all. Newsweek does a much smarter job, offer­ing a neat his­tory of the NSA, and pro­vid­ing a needed anti­dote to the myth of the agency’s omnipo­tence.

But increas­ingly, there has been talk of the agency’s “going deaf.” The NSA had its best luck mon­i­tor­ing Soviet lines of com­mu­ni­ca­tion­for exam­ple, a microwave trans­mis­sion from Moscow to a mis­sile base in Siberia. But the new enemy is more shad­owy and elu­sive. In 2002, General Hayden told NEWSWEEK, “We’ve gone from chas­ing the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions struc­ture of a slow-​​moving, tech­no­log­i­cally infe­rior, resource-​​poor nation-​​stateand we could do that pretty wellto chas­ing a com­mu­ni­ca­tions struc­ture in which an Al Qaeda mem­ber can go into a store­front in Istanbul and buy for $100 a com­mu­ni­ca­tions device that is absolutely cut­ting edge, and for which he has had to make no invest­ment for devel­op­ment.“
According to most accounts, the NSA remains behind the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions curve. A December 2002 report by the Senate intel­li­gence com­mit­tee noted that only a “tiny frac­tion” of the NSA’s 650 mil­lion daily inter­cepts world­wide “are actu­ally ever reviewed by humans, and much of what is col­lected gets lost in the del­uge of data.” Hayden told NEWSEEK that year that the NSA had been slow to catch up to new tech­nol­ogy, and that he was obsessed with turn­ing the enemy’s “beeps and squeaks into some­thing intel­li­gi­ble.“
One of Hayden’s most ambi­tious ini­tia­tives was called Trailblazer. It was a pro­gram aimed at help­ing the NSA make sense of its many data­basesto put them to use. By more effi­ciently locat­ing and retriev­ing mes­sages, Trailblazer could help the NSA “data-​​mine,” to find pat­terns in the huge vol­ume of elec­tronic traf­fic that might help lead sleuths to a ter­ror sus­pect. Instead, the pro­gram has pro­duced nearly a bil­lion dol­lars’ worth of junk hard­ware and soft­ware. “It’s a com­plete and abject fail­ure,” says Robert D. Steele, a CIA vet­eran who is famil­iar with the pro­gram. Adds Ed Giorgio, who was the chief code breaker for the NSA for 30 years: “Everybody’s eyes rolled when you men­tioned Trailblazer.“
What went wrong? The NSA appar­ently tried a clunky top-​​down approach, try­ing to sat­isfy too many require­ments with one grand solu­tion, rather than tak­ing a more Silicon Valley-​​like tack of let­ting small entre­pre­neurs com­pete for ideas. John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, Calif., a renowned “net­work” intel­li­gence expert, says: “The real prob­lem Big Brother is hav­ing is he’s not mak­ing enough use of the Little Brothers“the cor­po­ra­tions that have become expert at manip­u­lat­ing data­bases for com­mer­cial use.
“Data min­ing” has been a boon to credit-​​card com­pa­nies that can match cus­tomers and prod­ucts. It has also helped the Feds track drug deal­ers who con­stantly buy and throw away cell phones (the tech­nol­ogy can mon­i­tor fre­quent phone-​​number changes). Identifying and track­ing ter­ror­ists may be a taller order. For one thing, ter­ror­ists have learned not to even use phones. A com­puter disk or mes­sage between, say, Osama bin Laden and Iraqi insur­gent leader Abu Mussab al-​​Zarqawi is hand-​​delivered. Some ter­ror­ists have learned to leave mes­sages hid­den in Web sites. Others are given pass­words to go on the Web sites and find the mes­sages. Since that process involves no elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tionno e-​​mail or phone callthe NSA is kept in the dark.

Meanwhile, Newsweek’s tech­nol­o­gist, Steven Levy, takes a page out of the Defense Tech play­book and chats with our pal Valdis Krebs. The Times gets proof for what Bobby Ray Inman told us on Monday: that Dick Cheney is the dri­ving force behind the CIA pro­gram. The Washington Post catches DNI John Negroponte in an eaves­drop­ping fib. The AP wraps a rather-​​hysterical head­line (“Spy Agency Watching Americans From Space”) around a fairly sober look at the National Geospatial-​​Intelligence Agency. And News​.com has a handy FAQ on the call record brouhaha. But my favorite NSA-​​related arti­cle from the week­end comes from the Chicago Trib’s tech­nol­ogy ace, John Van, who talks to researchers about just how help­ful all this link analy­sis and data min­ing might be.

The like­li­hood of suc­cess, Northwestern University’s Kris Hammond said, is higher if agents have spe­cific ques­tions, such as hypo­thet­i­cally what mobile phones in Washington, D.C., made calls to Tehran dur­ing a given period, and whether calls were made from those phones to San Francisco dur­ing another period.
But if offi­cials don’t know what they’re look­ing for, they can’t expect a data min­ing pro­gram to con­nect all the dots.
“If you approach the data with­out spe­cific ques­tions and just look for pat­terns, you can find hun­dreds of mil­lions of pat­terns,” Hammond said.
Despite advances in arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, com­put­ers aren’t like human detec­tives who can make infer­ences and shift assump­tions on the fly, said Yali Amit, a University of Chicago pro­fes­sor of sta­tis­tics and com­puter sci­ence.
Government agents may not under­stand this, he said.
“They have records from mil­lions of inno­cent peo­ple and per­haps a few thou­sand ter­ror­ists who might make phone calls,” said Amit. “The size of the data set of interest–the terrorists–is too small. You get reli­a­bil­ity rates that make the whole endeavor pretty ridicu­lous.“
The White House hasn’t con­firmed the NSA pro­gram, but in December, an offi­cial of DARPA, a Defense Department agency that funds advanced research, pub­lished a paper in an aca­d­e­mic jour­nal that sug­gests an ambi­tious role for link min­ing.
“Metaphorically, link min­ing offers the poten­tial not only for con­nect­ing the dots, but for deter­min­ing which dots to con­nect, a far more dif­fi­cult task,” wrote Ted Senator, who stip­u­lated he was express­ing his own views, not those of DARPA or the government. 

UPDATE 11:28 PM: Defense Tech pal Kim Zetter has a dyna­mite inter­view with intel­li­gence his­to­rian Matthew Aid:

I’ll tell you where this story prob­a­bly will go next. Notice the USA Today arti­cle doesn’t men­tion whether the Internet ser­vice providers or cell­phone providers or com­pa­nies oper­at­ing transat­lantic cables like Global Crossing coop­er­ated with the NSA. That’s the next round of rev­e­la­tions. The real vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties for the NSA are the com­pa­nies. Sooner or later one of these com­pa­nies, fear­ing the inevitable law­suit from the ACLU, is going to admit what it did, and the whole thing is going to come tum­bling down…
The newest sys­tem being added to the NSA infra­struc­ture, by the way, is called Project Trailblazer, which was ini­ti­ated in 2002 and which was sup­posed to go online about now but is fan­tas­ti­cally over bud­get and way behind sched­ule. Trailblazer is designed to copy the new forms of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions — fiber optic cable traf­fic, cell­phone com­mu­ni­ca­tion, BlackBerry and Internet e-​​mail traffic. 

May 14th, 2006 | You can run... | 322022 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/05/14/nsa-not-so-tough/NSA%3A+Not+So+Tough%3F2006-05-15+03%3A13%3A08david_axe You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.