A question of legality.
In the news today is the revelation that the NSA has been using something called a Narus 6400, which I take to be a very high capacity and fully programmable packet sniffer, to intercept massive amounts of data from AT&T and one presumes, a bunch of carriers in order to persue the President's initiative on connecting the dots.
We know that Congress has been briefed and we have the assurances of key 'critters that the scope of these investigations, while pushing the envelope of the FISA warrant protocol, is most certainly aimed at terrorists and their associates. So while there are plenty of folks who appear permanently outraged, an interesting question did pop up over at Kevin Drum's joint.
Data mining means what you do with the data after you've collected it. You use statistical analysis and other techniques to discover relationships and patterns, on the basis of which you can take further action.
Where did you get the data? That's what is at issue. They giot the data illegally without a warrant. THEN they used data mining to narrow the scope of their privacy invasion, so that they could get more data illegally without a warrant.
Kevin Drumfuk, the ex marketing guy, knows enough about marketing to be dangerous. By dismissing all this as "data mining" he has led countless other moderates to be relatively unconcerned about this NSA thing -- except for the technical issue of Bush not obtaining warrants for the deeper penetration.
It was logically clear from the beginning why Bush didn't go for the warrants. He couldn't, because the evidence he would have had to use to justify the warrants had been illegally obtained in the first place, by wide-scale and indiscriminate wiretapping. Whether they used sophisticated data miningh strategies or just plain common sense mdoesn't matter. It was illegal from the word go.
Once you cut through the screaming, the question boils down to this. If you're tasked with catching and skinning only blue fish, is it legal to use a net that catches every colored fish? The common sense answer is (whether or not the legal answer is) that so long as you throw the other fish back, it doesn't matter. Or does it?
What little I know about domestic surveillance I learned chasing down some arguments about how the LAPD or FBI might deal with a drug dealer, as well as when the discussion was on Carnivore. Basically, when you tap the wire you tap the entire wire - ie you use the big net. While you listen, and tape, the only part of the conversations that are admissible in court are those relevant to charge. So part of the data mining question is not so much whether or not the Narus box is located at AT&T's central switches, but what volume of data they are sending back to NSA, in other words the collection protocol.
Forget the instrumentality for a moment. If I were the NSA, I would allow the box to be remotely programmed so that if I have a new target profile, I wouldn't have to send a tech to each site. I would also take the smallest reasonable amount of data out of the switch center to make my searches more efficient (reduce the data mining universe and insure against false positive hits) and to reduce my legal liability for eavesdropping. Not to mention that the more data that travels from AT&T to the NSA, the less relatively secure it is.
Drum's nemisis is arguing that NSA is collecting an un-audited & ungodly amount of data from which to mine nuggets of terrorist conspiracy, and that Republicans will necessarily keep a huge amount of this data for their own nefarious and corrupt purposes.
The disconnect between the NSA and the Republicans is something that lots of whiners blithely pave over. NSA professionals are of a different breed than GOP apparatchiks, let us keep that in mind. But here's where it gets interesting.
If I were the NSA, I would want to reverse-engineering Narus' technology. Why rent the cow when you can own the farm? The question on Narus' liability would depend a bit on whether or not its machine was doing all it was supposed to do, and if NSA hacks it and makes it grab more than it should, then Narus could be in trouble. But if the NSA had a reputation for doing such dirt, it would be difficult for them to ever get outside help, and I seem to recall that they were trying to improve their ability to leverage tech that wasn't invented there. Clearly EMC has done alright for itself (and it comes as no surprise that they own VMWare when you think about it). Still, the NSA's interest in domestic surveillance is basically 4 years old.
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