The excellent news weekly,
The Week, has a a good one-pager about the National Security Agency, which now has the Congressionally-approved power to conduct warrantless wiretaps.
A system called Echelon screens the flood of information for targeted phrases, names, phone numbers, and addresses, and alerts agents to any matches. In 2003, the NSA had flagged 10 different cell phones used by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. When his voice matched with one of the numbers, the agency used satellites to triangulate his position and grab him. Ninety-five percent of the raw material collected by the NSA is never translated into intelligible language. But raw data can also be useful. The NSA practices “data mining”: analyzing communications for patterns—such as phone numbers being frequently connected with other numbers—that can be revealing even if the content of conversations is not known. Information from the NSA makes up about 75 percent of the president’s daily intelligence briefing.
Link
the latest
latest episodes
"Information from the NSA makes up about 75 percent of the president’s daily intelligence briefing."
It's a good thing he doesn't read or pay attention to those briefings! My experience is that evil people and ideas more often fails because of their own incompetence than from a concerted effort from others. GW is case in point.
I think there's a slight confusion in that excerpt between "data mining" and "network analysis:" network analysis relates unrelated instances of communication into meaningful patterns and can be practiced without access to the content of those communications. "Data mining" relates disparate pieces of data into patterns - e.g. taking data from from Credit Agencies, the DMV, the post office, airlines, etc., and making these data tell a coherent story about some particular individual. The NSA probably practices both of these (e.g. the putatively defunct TIA program) and as means of intelligence gathering they obviously have differing impacts on privacy: one requires not knowing the content of communications, the other requires exactly that.
Back in the late 80s and early 90s, my friends and I would regularly send each other lists of keywords designed to trigger Echelon.
We thought it was hilarious agitprop back then, but in these days of extraordinary rendition, creepy TSA detentions at airports, and the suspension of habeus corpus whenever King George chokes on a pretzel, it seems like less fun than it once was.
However, I would like to say . . .
Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charges, ambush, sniping, motorcade, IRS, BATF, jtf-6, mjtf, hrt, srt, hostages, munitions, weapons, TNT, rdx, amfo, hmtd, picric acid.
Thank you.
Wil
I was thinking the same.
As we know, there are systems to get spambots into a trap of fake mails and very soon we will see a similar way of fool these NSA systems.
#3 Bah! That list won't do it.
Anthrax, Red mercury, Reptoids, 23, Venusian condor men, 23, Area 51, DILUTE! DILUTE! OK! ALL-ONE!, 23, INTJ, Eschaton, Project Aura, MK-Ultra
There. Now that list will get you into a Halliburton relocation camp when they start preemptive detentions after the bunker busters start falling on Iran.