Even though Congress refused to fund the Pentagon's Orwellian Total Information Awareness program in 2003, the NSA has been working to expand its ability to collect information on American citizens' private affairs. TIA never completely went away because NSA has a combination of data mining programs that mirror it. NSA receives massive amounts of electronic data from other sources and processes it using high speed computers looking for patterns that seem suspicious. Input data ranges from Internet searches and cellphone traffic to international banking records kept by the Belgium based clearinghouse known as SWIFT(Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications). NSA gets access to telecommunications from switches maintained by the FBI. Former agents confirm that there are several shadow telecommunication hubs around the country. The Treasury Department provides access to bank and credit card data. Generally the contents of an e mail or telephone conversation are not used, but the "transactional" records can reveal a lot of information such as a cellphone's location, the identity of persons involved, what Web sites are being accessed, the subject matter of e mails, passenger manifests, travel times and destinations. The agency uses a sophisticated form of social network analysis developed by the Pentagon in it's experimental TIA program to analyse the data. The Pentagon's program was not funded for operation when it became public, but some money was provided for further research. NSA receives it's budget from the Pentagon and much of it is black, or beyond close scrutiny by Congress. The budget for data mining at NSA is estimated to be $1 billion. The FBI is requesting $42 million for it's Digital Collection System. Budget justifications cite an ever increasing demand for information and facilitating information sharing. According to the Wall Street Journal, the agency's secret activities offer citizens even less protection than the Pentagon program such as requiring intelligence officers to obtain leads from other sources first. Reasonable people can differ over how many details of a person's life should remain private, but the Fourth Amendment implications of the government's increasing ability to extensively profile an individual from their electronic trail is being lost in the political battle over telecommunication company immunity and stymied by the government's insistence on secrecy.
Monday, March 10, 2008
A Police State Legacy
Even though Congress refused to fund the Pentagon's Orwellian Total Information Awareness program in 2003, the NSA has been working to expand its ability to collect information on American citizens' private affairs. TIA never completely went away because NSA has a combination of data mining programs that mirror it. NSA receives massive amounts of electronic data from other sources and processes it using high speed computers looking for patterns that seem suspicious. Input data ranges from Internet searches and cellphone traffic to international banking records kept by the Belgium based clearinghouse known as SWIFT(Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications). NSA gets access to telecommunications from switches maintained by the FBI. Former agents confirm that there are several shadow telecommunication hubs around the country. The Treasury Department provides access to bank and credit card data. Generally the contents of an e mail or telephone conversation are not used, but the "transactional" records can reveal a lot of information such as a cellphone's location, the identity of persons involved, what Web sites are being accessed, the subject matter of e mails, passenger manifests, travel times and destinations. The agency uses a sophisticated form of social network analysis developed by the Pentagon in it's experimental TIA program to analyse the data. The Pentagon's program was not funded for operation when it became public, but some money was provided for further research. NSA receives it's budget from the Pentagon and much of it is black, or beyond close scrutiny by Congress. The budget for data mining at NSA is estimated to be $1 billion. The FBI is requesting $42 million for it's Digital Collection System. Budget justifications cite an ever increasing demand for information and facilitating information sharing. According to the Wall Street Journal, the agency's secret activities offer citizens even less protection than the Pentagon program such as requiring intelligence officers to obtain leads from other sources first. Reasonable people can differ over how many details of a person's life should remain private, but the Fourth Amendment implications of the government's increasing ability to extensively profile an individual from their electronic trail is being lost in the political battle over telecommunication company immunity and stymied by the government's insistence on secrecy.