Well, we’re beginning to get a little more clarity on what, exactly, the NSA’s carefree warrantless wonderland entails. DefenseTech notes a new Times article, and its claim that the NSA’s program revolved around large scale snarfing (technical hax0r term) of data at switches:
The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.
As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.
Well, duh.
The fact is none of this is particularly secret; the FCC has been quite publically trying to promulgate rules that would make VOIP (internet telephony) and internet service providers provide the same levvel of access that telephone companies have been cheerfully offering up for eleven years:
New federal wiretapping rules forcing Internet service providers and universities to rewire their networks for FBI surveillance of e-mail and Web browsing are being challenged in court.
Telecommunications firms, nonprofit organizations and educators are asking the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., to overturn the controversial rules, which dramatically extend the sweep of an 11-year-old surveillance law designed to guarantee police the ability to eavesdrop on telephone calls.
When you place a phone call, connect to the internet, use an ATM, offer up your credit card, or basically do anything which involves point-to-point communications over any distance greater than shouting range, that information is - if it’s analog - digitized, “trunked” (combined with like communications on extremely high bandwidth backbone lines), and routed, across a network, over a series of switches, to it’s destination. If it is big enough - a part of the backbone - that switch has, BY LAW, been tapped by the NSA for eleven or more years. That capacity, domestically and internationally, is the backbone of the NSA’s surveillance capability (the FBI angle in the article is a big ol’ fakeout. No Such Agency leaves their name out of the papers). The NSA has the theoretical capability to monitor any telecommunications link, voice or data, that passes in any capacity through the United States. This is not news. It’s what they do. The checks and balances that existed prior to November 2001 were matters of software: while the data was acquired, it was not analyzed; the capacity remained theoretical. The NSA only gained the right to analyze this data - by listening, by crunching numbers, by correlating it to criminal investigations - when the FISA court issued a warrant. Paranoids and cypherpunks have argued for years that a legal restriction against hitting the “Tap Everybody” button is a wildly inadequate corrective pressure, but that’s sort of academic now. The genie has left the bottle, long since.
A few days ago, based on my own understanding and some conversations with educated outsiders, I posted a best-guess suggestion for what the NSA have been ordered to do. With the revelations of the past few days, notably in the oft-mocked NYT, I can narrow that down a bit, and paint a hypothetical portrait of the lifecycle of a warrantless wiretap.
The process begins in Afghanistan or Berlin or Cairo, when a known Al Qaeda associate coughs up his cell phone or address book or calling records, or stops in at a house and uses the phone, or pisses in an alley two blocks over from a restaurant with a phone line. However it happens, a set of numbers with some vague association to terrorism is acquired, and transferred to the NSA. The NSA takes those numbers and adds them to a large master list. That master list is a filter; it fords the great gushing torrent of conversation (every international call that passes through a US facility), calls to and from marked numbers duplicated on over to the NSA. When a US phone number calls, or is called by, a number on the master list, that phone is immediately and automatically tapped. At whatever [redacted] NSA facility, the agents on call (and, as we have heard so many times, their shift supervisor), are notified of the existence of the tap. Large, fancy computer programs begin to analyze the calling patterns of the number in question, and the content of conversations held on that line. After some while (probably not that long: them clever computers) the operative and his supervisor are informed that this number is 96 or 98 or 99% certain to NOT be a “dirty number” used by terrorists, or the terrorist adjacent. At that point, the shift supervisor makes the decision to hit “stop”, and the tap is ended. Or alternatively, the computer can’t attain that level of certainty, and the tap remains, indefinitely, periodically monitored by live humans, but mostly just run through automated speech analysis. If the tapped line makes a lot of calls to some other international number, that number might end up on the master list, and the process begins all over again, one step removed.
So there you go. Again, I’m speculating, but it’s a pretty good bet that they’re doing this or something like it. It’s neither particularly new nor particularly difficult technology, and has been used to different ends by private industry for many years.