NSA Illegal Wiretapping is the “Tip”
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| Newt weighs NO. |
It's all about “ingestion, digestion, and distribution” of intelligence
according to Bill Arkin. Democrats aren't the only ones alarmed. Any American
should care about this program, because of the scope of it. Already several big
Republicans have come out against it. Diane Feinstein did the mother of all
flip flops this week when she went from praising Michael Hayden one moment, to
saying the revelation of the phone call captures may doom his CIA nomination.
Thanks, Di, always like when you chime in with such seriousness. Think
Progress has quite a few quotes. Joe
Scarborough even gets this one right, saying today that “This program scares the hell out of me.”
However, the American people say if it will keep me safe, no problem. The issue is that the NSA program did not work. It wasn't effective and didn't catch anyone. It didn't work.
House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH): “I am concerned about what
I read with regard to NSA databases of phone calls.”Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-OH): “While I support aggressively tracking al-Qaida,
the administration needs to answer some tough questions about the protection
of our civil liberties.”Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC): “The idea of collecting millions or thousands
of phone numbers, how does that fit into following the enemy?”
Newt Gingrich said, “I don’t think the way they’ve handled
this can be defended by reasonable people. It is sloppy. It is contradictory,
and frankly for normal Americans, it makes no sense to listen to these three
totally different explanations.”
There's a reason people are unsettled by what the NSA has been doing. Besides
the fact that it's anti-American, against the Fourth Amendment. What else are
they doing they we don't know? This is the beginning of the dam breaking, if
you ask me. What comes next is likely to be even worse, that is, if it's like
everything else that's been going on.
The call records are “structured data,” that is, information maintained
in a standardized format that can be easily analyzed by machine programs without
human intervention. They're different from intercepts of actual communication
between people in that they don't contain the “content” of the communications
— content that the Supreme Court has ruled is protected under the Fourth
Amendment. You can think of call records as what's outside the envelope, as
opposed to what's on the inside.Once collected, the call records and other non-content communication are
being churned through a mind boggling network of software and data mining
tools to extract intelligence. And this NSA dominated program of ingestion,
digestion, and distribution of potential intelligence raises profound questions
about the privacy and civil liberties of all Americans.Although there is no evidence that the harvesting programs have been involved
in illegal activity or have been abused to reach into the lives of innocent
Americans, their sheer scope, the number of “transactions” being
tracked, raises questions as to whether an all-seeing domestic surveillance
system isn't slowly being established, one that in just a few years time will
be able to reveal the interactions of any targeted individual in near real
time.I could write volumes about the research efforts and the software programs and tools used to process the mountains of information the NSA and other agencies ingest. No doubt over the coming days and weeks, more will be written. For today though, I provide a pointer, based upon my research, of software, tools and intelligence databases that I have been able to identify in government documents relating to data mining, link analysis, and ingestion, digestion, and distribution of intelligence. My hope would be that other journalists and researchers will follow the leads.
The following is a list of some 500 software tools, databases, data mining and processing efforts contracted for, under development or in use at the NSA and other intelligence agencies today: … … …
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