Total Information Awareness Redux

Just what has the NSA been doing with the phone logs being handed over to the agency as reported by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today?

Well, last week, USA Today's John Diamond and Leslie Cauley (who broke the Verizon/Bellsouth story) reported that the NSA was using templates to find calling patterns that look like a terrorist network.

The template, the officials say, was created from a secret database of phone call records collected by the spy agency. It has been used since 9/11 to identify calling patterns that indicate possible terrorist activity. Among the patterns examined: flurries of calls to U.S. numbers placed immediately after the domestic caller received a call from Pakistan or Afghanistan, the sources say. Link

That sounds exactly like the general principle behind the now ostensibly moth-balled Total Information Awareness program, which aimed to scour through databases of Americans' transactions and communications to find patterns of activity that looked similar to a pattern of actions that terrorists might take. (For example, make overseas phone calls, rent a truck, and buy fertilizer from a hardware store)

The hurdles that the NSA data-mining program faces are much the same as those that were faced by TIA:

"With meaningful pattern recognition, the order of magnitude of errors from inferences is huge, something like ten to the third (power)," said Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce and the chairman of information mapping software company Groxis. "There would be an incalculable expense to monitor a thousand wrong hits for one correct inference." Link

What does that mean in real life?†

Leads that dead end at the local pizza joint, according to former NSA analyst Ira Winkler.

FBI agents working real and pressing investigations such as organized crime, child pornography and missing persons are being pulled away from their normal law enforcement duties to follow up on NSA leads. Nobody wants another 9/11, of course, but we experience real crimes on a daily basis that, over the course of even one year, cause far greater loss of life and damage than the 9/11 attacks did.† There are children abused on a daily basis to facilitate online child pornography, yet I know of at least two agents who were pulled from their duties tracking down child abusers to investigate everyone who called the same pizza parlor as a person who received a call from a person who received an overseas call.† There are plenty of similar examples.

New York Times reporters found the same thing:

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the FBI in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

FBI officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency, which was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of foreign-related phone and Internet traffic, that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. Some FBI officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.

It's still unclear if there's any nexus between the old Total Information Awareness program and the ongoing NSA program.

But stay tuned for tomorrow's takedown of the specious arguments that when Congress killed off the TIA program, it neglected to note how privacy-conscious the program was and thus, inadvertently killed off important privacy research when it defunded part of the program.

Tags: totalinformationawareness, nsa, privacy, tia, CanADataMiningProgramFindTheBestThinCrustPizzaParlorWestOfTheMississippiIfQwestWon'tTurnOverItsPhoneRecords?