USA Today: The NSA has a HUGE database of Americans' calls

by **stickdog99** » Thu May 11, 2006 6:39 am

Just calls to suspected al Qaeda members abroad, right? Just trust them; it's a highly targeted program, right? What was that Lord Acton said about absolute power again? <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm?POE=NEWISVA">www.usatoday.com/news/was...OE=NEWISVA</a> The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY. The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans -- most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews. "It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added. For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made -- across town or across the country -- to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others. The three telecommunications companies are working under contract with the NSA, which launched the program in 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the sources said. The program is aimed at identifying and tracking suspected terrorists, they said. ... The usefulness of the NSA's domestic phone-call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear. Also unclear is whether the database has been used for other purposes. The NSA's domestic program raises legal questions. Historically, AT&T and the regional phone companies have required law enforcement agencies to present a court order before they would even consider turning over a customer's calling data. Part of that owed to the personality of the old Bell Telephone System, out of which those companies grew. much more ...

by **Col Quisp** » Thu May 11, 2006 11:24 am

Qwest was the only carrier that didn't go along. Lies on top of lies...when will it end?<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/eyes.gif ALT=":rolleyes">

by **thoughtographer** » Thu May 11, 2006 11:31 am

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>Qwest was the only carrier that didn't go along.<hr></blockquote> Damn -- and Qwest used to be the bane of my existence when I had a frame relay circuit through them. "A crooked stick will cast a crooked shadow."

by **StarmanSkye** » Thu May 11, 2006 2:16 pm

Related: The NSA refused to give the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility Lawyers a security clearance to investigate the NSA's wiretapping program and possible Justice Department wrongdoing -- essentially killing any possible Judicial Review. How's that for evading responsibility -- simply declare your actions are too 'sensitive' and vital to National Security to allow any interference by the courts. From what I gather, Republicans have effectively quashed Congressional review of the wiretapping program. So as an issue ot's dead in the water. I don't think sufficient attention has been given to the danger in this vast climate of anything-goes spying/surveillance for the abuses now possible for the selling of industrial espionage information to competitors, and for blackmail and other unethical purposes, such as enabling unscrupulous businesses to undermine their competitors and to exploit manufactured economic-crisis, ie. coerced 'sale' of equity properties, industries and other productive assets, and theft of trade secrets and processes, even the targetted prospecting of identified crucial executives and valuable employees to undermine a competing firm. Industrial espionage and security risks have become major issues in this age as the inequities and contradictions of mature corporate-capitalism have led to increasingly reckless and desperate practices -- with criminal acts and corruption once mostly limited to foreign properties now rampant within the US. NOT that I am for one minute defending corporations here, but pointing out how widespread 'official' spying is enabling the increased consolidation of corporate wealth and power, ie. feudal racketeering and monopolization. As one would expect in a fascist state where power is concentrated in the intimate partnership of corporations and government. That's the well-established trend evident in the US's past century of bloody wars and neocolonial conquests --where the US's interventions have consistently undermined justice, democracy and economic opportunity -- from Haiti to the Phillipines, and from Panama to Iraq. Now the robber barons and their Pentagon perps have expanded the field of their racketeering operations to include the US. Starman ****** <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060510/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/domestic_spying">news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060...tic_spying</a> Security Issue Kills Domestic Spying Probe By DEVLIN BARRETT, Associated Press Writer Wed May 10, 7:49 PM ET WASHINGTON - The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter. The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers' role in the program. "We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program," OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey's office shared the letter with The Associated Press. Jarrett wrote that beginning in January, his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday. "Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation," wrote Jarrett. Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the terrorist surveillance program "has been subject to extensive oversight both in the executive branch and in Congress from the time of its inception." Roehrkasse noted the OPR's mission is not to investigate possible wrongdoing in other agencies, but to determine if Justice Department lawyers violated any ethical rules. He declined to comment when asked if the end of the inquiry meant the agency believed its lawyers had handled the wiretapping matter ethically. Hinchey is one of many House Democrats who have been highly critical of the domestic eavesdropping program first revealed in December. He said lawmakers would push to find out who at the NSA denied the Justice Department lawyers security clearance. "This administration thinks they can just violate any law they want, and they've created a culture of fear to try to get away with that. It's up to us to stand up to them," said Hinchey. In February, the OPR announced it would examine the conduct of its own agency's lawyers in the program, though they were not authorized to investigate NSA activities. Bush's decision to authorize the largest U.S. spy agency to monitor people inside the United States, without warrants, generated a host of questions about the program's legal justification. The administration has vehemently defended the eavesdropping, saying the NSA's activities were narrowly targeted to intercept international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the U.S. with suspected ties to the al-Qaida terror network. Separately, the Justice Department sought last month to dismiss a federal lawsuit accusing the telephone company AT&T of colluding with the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program. The lawsuit, brought by an Internet privacy group, does not name the government as a defendant, but the Department of Justice has sought to quash the lawsuit, saying it threatens to expose government and military secrets.

by **Ike Broflovski** » Thu May 11, 2006 3:05 pm

All of it, everything, every call, every bit. Echelon was child's play! I wonder if they're just tracking every call, or if the stream of geolocation data from every cell phone is archived somewhere? At least we don't have to feel paranoid for suspecting this shit when USA Today comes right out and says it.

by **dugoboy** » Thu May 11, 2006 8:02 pm

i wonder if this was released to discredit Haydan? it seems like theres been some heavy info war on the media in recent weeks, the current battle seems to have started when Sy Hersh's article about nuking iran was released. theres been all sorts of things. theres the charlie sheen appearance on alex jones. the barrage of 'amandinjad (iran's president) is the new saddam' media blitz (he said, she said). the steven colbert 'non event' then ray mcgovern's grilling of rumsfeld (ray has all but announced he thinks 911 was an inside job). the immigration protests. then the goss resignation. foggo resignation 'non event'. the haydan nomination. the much further than previously thought expanded NSA domestic spying (pushed by Haydan) expose. :slows breathing: <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/embarassed.gif ALT=":o"> Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=dugoboy@rigorousintuition>dugoboy</A> at: 5/11/06 6:16 pm

by **dugoboy** » Thu May 11, 2006 8:20 pm

link:<a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12727867/from/RSS/" target="top">Security issue kills domestic spying inquiry</a> MAY 10TH WTF!! my local TV news station said: "some sources tell us it even has a name." Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=dugoboy@rigorousintuition>dugoboy</A> at: 5/11/06 6:25 pm

by **Ike Broflovski** » Thu May 11, 2006 8:28 pm

it seems like theres been some heavy info war on the media in recent weeks And how. Hard to figure out what it all means or who's on which side, but there is a hell of a lot going on.

by **dugoboy** » Thu May 11, 2006 8:34 pm

united 93 movie. iranian presidents letter. bush declares war on terra as world war 3 on cnbc. tomorrow?

by **isachar** » Thu May 11, 2006 10:47 pm

« "Every Call Ever Made" in NSA Database | Main NSA Sweep "Waste of Time," Analyst Says It'd be one thing if the NSA's massive sweep of our phone records was actually helping catch terrorists. But what if it's not working at all? A leading practitioner of the kind of analysis the NSA is supposedly performing in this surveillance program says that "it's a waste of time, a waste of resources. And it lets the real terrorists run free." Re-reading the USA Today piece, one paragraph jumped out: This kind of data collection from phone companies is not uncommon; it's been done before, though never on this large a scale, the official said. The data are used for 'social network analysis,' the official said, meaning to study how terrorist networks contact each other and how they are tied together. So I called Valdis Krebs, who's considered by many to be the leading authority on social network analysis -- the art and science of finding the important connections in a seemingly-impenetrable mass of data. His analysis of the social network surrounding the 9/11 hijackers is a classic in the field. Here's what Krebs had to say about the newly-revealed NSA program that aims to track "every call ever made": "If you're looking for a needle, making the haystack bigger is counterintuitive. It just doesn't make sense." "Certain people are more suspicious than others," he adds. They make frequent trips back-and-forth to Afghanistan, for instance. "So you start with them. And you work two steps out. If none of those people are connected, you don't have a cell. Because if one was there, you'd find some clustering. You don't have to collect all the data in the world to do that." The right thing to do is to look for the best haystack, not the biggest haystack. We knew exactly which haystack to look at in the year 2000 [before the 9/11 attacks]. We just didn't do it... The worst part -- the thing that's most disappointing to me -- is that this is not the right way to do this. It's a waste of time, a waste of resources. And it lets the real terrorists run free. UPDATE 2:30 PM: Shane Harris broke this story, in broad strokes, back in March, Patrick reminds us. Harris also offers a possible explanation for some of the NSA program's massive size: To find meaningful patterns in transactional data, analysts need a lot of it. They must set baselines about what constitutes "normal" behavior versus "suspicious" activity. Administration officials have said that the NSA doesn't intercept the contents of a communication unless officials have a "reasonable" basis to conclude that at least one party is linked to a terrorist organization. To make any reasonable determination like that, the agency needs hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of call records, preferably as soon as they are created, said a senior person in the defense industry who is familiar with the NSA program and is an expert in the analytical tools used to find patterns and connections. Asked if this means that the NSA program is much broader and less targeted than administration officials have described, the expert replied, "I think that's correct." Harris also fingers a likely program set of research efforts to help the NSA better comb through all this data: "Novel Intelligence from Massive Data," or NIMD. Its goal is to develop "techniques and tools that assist analysts not only in dealing with massive data, but also in interactively making explicit - and modifying and updating - their current analytic (cognitive) state, which includes not only their hypotheses, but also their knowledge, interests, and biases." You'll be shocked to hear that NIMD's website has been taken offline. But you can find Goggle caches about the program here, here, here, and here. UPDATE 5:19 PM: "To me, it's pretty clear that the people working on this program aren't as smart as they think they are," says former Air Force counter-terrorist specialist John Robb. "Some top level thinking indicates that this will quickly become a rat hole for federal funds (due to wasted effort) and a major source of infringement of personal freedom." John gives a bunch of reasons why. Here's just one: It will generate oodles of false positives. Al Qaeda is now in a phase where most domestic attacks will be generated by people not currently connected to the movement (like we saw in the London bombings). This means that in many respects they will look like you and me until they act. The large volume of false positives generated will not be hugely inefficient, it will be a major infringement on US liberties. For example, a false positive will likely get you automatically added to a no-fly list, your boss may be visited (which will cause you to lose your job), etc. UPDATE 6:23 PM: And now, the rebuttal. I just got off the phone with a source who has extensive experience in these matters. And he disagrees, strongly, with Krebs and Robb. Really, the source said, there are two approaches to whittling down massive amounts of information: limiting what you search from the beginning -- or taking absolutely everything in, and sifting through it afterwards. In his experience, the source said, the approach of using "brute force... not optimally, not smartly" on the front end, and "cleaning [the data] up later" worked the best. Often times, other people don't know what you're searching for (or they don't have the same super-slick data-mining algorithms you've got). Better just to get it all. In everything from speech analysis to sensor fusion, he argued, when you've got a weak signal masked by a lot of noise, "more data seems to be the answer... More data is what's going to allow you to get to ground truth." Of course, there's a price to pay with this approach: a ton of false alarms. Several stages of filtering should fix that, he argued. Besides, "it's not like you call the FBI every time you get a hit." Think of it as the Google approach. Wouldn't you rather have everything available on the search engine, and then do queries yourself? <a href="http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002399.html">www.defensetech.org/archives/002399.html</a>

by **Gouda** » Fri May 12, 2006 4:56 am

The defensetech.org analysis, if not falsely sincere, is purposefully naive: this huge NSAT&T phone sweep is not the way to find terrorists! What a waste of money! These NSA people aren't so smart! So it does not make sense to Valdis Krebs, social network analyst, when the phone sweep is understood to be looking for al qaeda-like "terrorist" patterns. He says: "The worst part -- the thing that's most disappointing to me -- is that this is not the right way to do this. It's a waste of time, a waste of resources. And it lets the real terrorists run free." Not a waste of time if a) the point is not to catch cartoon terrorists; but b) to monitor something else, in my opinion, the perennial class of real terrorists: dissenters, activists, organizers, anti-war anti-capitalists, and other economic agents (foreign or domestic) unfriendly to capital hegemony; and c) may also include trolling for blackmail and limited-hangout material on regular politicians, corporations, low-to-mid-level arms and drug runners etc. See massive Greece wiretapping/surveillance scandal thread. Could also be doing deeper psychosocial analysis of networking trends in correspondence with current events/triggers. Hell, even the <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm">USA Today article</a> referenced is wiser (or more honest) than defensetech.org - they slip this deep into the article: <blockquote>Quote:<hr>The usefulness of the NSA's domestic phone-call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear. Also unclear is whether the database has been used for other purposes.<hr></blockquote> Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=gouda@rigorousintuition>Gouda</A> at: 5/12/06 3:03 am

by **bvonahsen** » Fri May 12, 2006 5:52 am

I came across a Daily Kos diary that has relevance to todays' events. Read <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/5/7/93933/90072" target="top">this Kos diary</a> from Sun May 07, 2006 <blockquote>Quote:<hr> Domestic Spying: GOP and private NSA-CIA Contractors We now learn that Abramoff is at the center of a much wider web of criminal activity involving private-sector NSA contractors and GOP lawmakers. Abramoff served as a conduit between the NSA and private companies that have become the focus of multiple criminal prosecutions and national security investigations, including the abuse of prisoners abroad, and alledged spying on Capitol Hill lawmakers by Abramoff clients. Yesterday, we reported that Verizon (dba Qwest Wireless), is the focus of an NSA contracting scandal and a little-noticed trial of executives for cooking company books. Attorneys for Qwest's CEO, Joseph Nacchio, raised knowledge of classified government contracts anticipated by Qwest in 2001 as "one of the key elements to his defense." http://www.democraticunderground.com/.... ; also, see, http://today.reuters.com/.... That trial reveals something far more important about the corruption scandal that is gripping top GOP lawmakers. Abramoff and his associates manueuvered his clients -- including now bankrupt Enron, Global Crossing and Tyco International -- into federal contracts that gave them leverage over strategic U.S. markets, a role in framing foreign policy options, or unprecedented private-sector access to operating classified government data networks. This has resulted in the gravest constitutional crisis since Watergate, as well as a massive damage to U.S. national security. ... When asked point-blank recently whether the data being funneled into this privatized surveillance system was being used for domestic partisan purposes, Gen. Hayden refused to answer. At a question and answer session following an address at the National Press Club on January 23, 2006, Hayden was asked whether the Bush Administration was wiretapping its domestic political enemies. When Hayden dodged the question, the questioner repeated, "No, I asked, are you targeting us and people who politically oppose the Bush government, the Bush administration? Not a fishing net, but are you targeting specifically political opponents of the Bush administration?" Hayden looked at the questioner, and after a silence called on a different questioner.<hr></blockquote> It suggests a line of questioning that I would like to see pursued with both the baby bells and Gen Hayden when they come before the judiciary committee. Not that I'm holding my breath or anything.

by **Qutb** » Fri May 12, 2006 8:23 am

"wonder if this was released to discredit Haydan?" Me too. I doubt the timing of this was a coincidence. This program is probably controversial even within the intelligence system, and Hayden definitely is. Let's hope it's enough to prevent his appointment to the job.

by **Gouda** » Fri May 12, 2006 11:26 am

Methinks no coincidence either. Perhaps the USA Today scoop leaker does not like having her/his telephone calls logged and would prefer not to live his/her life communicating out in the park or under the bridge in trenchcoat, sunglasses and baseball cap. My question is, however, does it matter who is at the helm of the CIA or NSA when the system is so thoroughly corrupted and past the point of no return? Put a good guy/gal at the head, and they will do end runs around her/him to achieve whatever goal (or he/she is put into a dinghy that does not return to shore). Install yet another palatable, "lesser evil" in place of Hayden, and the job is still sure to get done via plan B, C, D... See Poindexter's TIA. Even reasonable transparency and oversight are impossible. When members of congress and the president himself do not have high enough security clearance in certain matters, it shows you who is really controlling the show. Note too that several top democrats either have supported Hayden (<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000103&sid=aXoEofLLKuUY&refer=us">Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who had spoken positively about him, said the issue presents ``a growing impediment to the confirmation.''</a>) or have not joined in legal filings to stop the wiretapping (<a href="http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Seventy_two_in_Congress_join_battle_0511.html">Top Democrats did not sign the call. Neither House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) nor House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) have joined the brief.</a>)

by **Dreams End** » Fri May 12, 2006 11:30 am

I've always assumed NSA does this sort of thing. Far bigger budget than CIA but no one knows what they do. Is this really that far from what they've been up to all along? Anyone know more about them in general...in terms of accusations of domestic intel. We know they've always monitored most overseas calls.

USA Today: The NSA has a HUGE database of Americans' calls

USA Today: The NSA has a HUGE database of Americans' calls

Yep...another lie exposed

Re: Yep...another lie exposed

NSA Kills-Off Justice Department Review of Wiretapping Abuse

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