CHICAGO--With winter's onset driving the demand for surface coal to
record-high levels, the mineral's cost is now beyond the reach of low-
and middle-income Americans who wish to punish their naughty children.
"Coal in one's stocking is meant to serve as an admonishment or
warning, not as a dependable grade-B investment," said William
Menchell, a commodities adviser for T. Rowe Price. "In today's market,
children should only have their stockings stuffed with lumps of coal if
they have been studious and obedient, and show an interest in long-term
investments in the energy sector." For more affordable punitive
options, analysts point to the relatively stagnant switch market, which
could soon go the way of coal if demand increases for combustible
wooden sticks.
A good question was raised by a caller on TOTN (Talk of the Nation)
yesterday. she asked if this technology was used by the administration
during the 2004 election to spy on the kerry camp and peaceful
protestors of the administration (i'm paraphrasing). without FISA/FISC
oversight, and without any transparency, how can this be trusted? The FBI already missused such powers against civil rights leaders (including MLK).
When the NSA wiretapping story
first hit the pages of the NYT a few days ago, there were clearly a
huge number of unanswered questions. Is the wiretapping that the
President has authorized illegal under the FISA act? Is it
unconstitutional? If it's illegal, does the President have the
authority to violate the law if he's acting in the best interests of
the republic? And then there's the question of why the NYT sat on this
story for over a year before going public with it.
I'm not really going to make any attempt to answer questions of
legality and constitutionality, because the Internet is full of
armchair constitutional scholars right now who're fighting tooth and
nail over these questions, generating much heat but very little light.
Instead, I'd like to point your attention to some later developments in
this case that clearly indicate that there's much more going on here
than we initially assumed. When the truth comes out (if it ever does),
this NSA wiretapping story will almost certainly be a story not just
about the Constitutional concept of the separation of powers, but about
high technology.
To return to the last question in the first paragraph, let's take a
look at the NYT's own answer. The quotes below are from NYT executive
editor Bill Keller's statement on the matter:
A year ago, when this information first became known to Times
reporters, the Administration argued strongly that writing about this
eavesdropping program would give terrorists clues about the
vulnerability of their communications and would deprive the government
of an effective tool for the protection of the country's security...
As we have done before in rare instances when faced with a
convincing national security argument, we agreed not to publish at that
time.
"We also continued reporting, and in the ensuing months two things
happened that changed our thinking... Second, in the course of
subsequent reporting we
satisfied ourselves that we could write about this program --
withholding a number of technical details -- in a way that would not
expose any intelligence-gathering methods or capabilities that are not
already on the public record.
(Emphasis in the above quote and in all subsequent quotes is added.)
So the NYT sat on this story for a year in part because they were
concerned that they wouldn't be able to report it without revealing
some crucial technical details of how the program works.
Now let's take a look a statement of former senator Bob Graham (D-FL),
who was one of the few senators to be briefed on the program. From a
new Washington Post article:
"I came out of the room with the full sense that we were dealing with a
change in technology but not policy," Graham said, with new
opportunities to intercept overseas calls that passed through U.S.
switches.
Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly has rounded up
a few more quotes like those above (including the NYT quote), that also
help make a very good case that what's at issue here is some kind of
new NSA surveillance technology:
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales,
telling reporters why Bush didn't simply ask Congress to pass a law
making the program clearly legal: "We've had discussions with members
of Congress, certain members of Congress, about whether or not we could
get an amendment to FISA, and we were advised that that was not likely
to be - that was not something we could likely get, certainly not
without jeopardizing the existence of the program, and therefore,
killing the program."
President Bush,
answering questions at Monday's press conference: "We use FISA
still....But FISA is for long-term monitoring....There is a difference
between detecting so we can prevent, and monitoring. And it's important
to know the distinction between the two....We used the [FISA] process
to monitor. But also....we've got to be able to detect and prevent."
Senator Jay Rockefeller,
in a letter to Dick Cheney after being briefed on the program in 2003:
"As I reflected on the meeting today, and the future we face, John
Poindexter's TIA project sprung to mind, exacerbating my concern
regarding the direction the Administration is moving with regard to
security, technology, and surveillance."
This last quote above, the one about TIA, is especially telling. TIA
was a massive electronic intelligence gathering program designed to
mechanically sift through phone calls, emails, and other electronic
communications in order to build pictures of how individuals fit into
larger networks. We covered TIA here on Ars, but of all the coverage I
think Caesar's initial take on it seems the most directly applicable to
the current situation:
This system's purpose would be to monitor communications and detect
would-be terrorists and plots before they happen... This project is not
interested in funding "evolutionary" changes in technology, e.g.,
bit-step improvements to current data mining and storage techniques.
Rather, the amount of data that the directors are anticipating
(petabytes!) would require massive leaps in technology (and perhaps
also some massive leaps in surveillance laws). According to DARPA, such
data collection "increases information coverage by an order of
magnitude," and ultimately "requires keeping track of individuals and
understanding how they fit into models."
"Massive leaps in surveillance laws" indeed. TIA became public in
2002, and Congress quickly put the kibosh on it. This is right about
the time that Bush secretly signed the executive order authorizing the
new NSA wiretap program.
So, are TIA and the NSA wiretapping directive related? That probably
depends on what you mean by "related." I doubt seriously they're the
same thing, but it's entirely possible that the undescribed new
technology used in the NSA wiretapping program was also going to be
deployed as a part of TIA's massive data collection efforts.
My main point in bringing up TIA is twofold: 1) TIA-like efforts are still going on (Defensetech catalogs some),
and 2) the government has been trying to use new technology, like
database tech and voice recognition, for domestic surveillance for a
long time. And when I say a long time, I mean well before the current
administration came into office.
The domestic electronic surveillance ball really got rolling under
the Clinton administration, with the 1994 Communications Assistance for
Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). CALEA mandated that the telcos aid
wiretapping by installing remote wiretap ports onto their digital
switches so that the switch traffic would be available for snooping by
law enforcement. After CALEA passed, the FBI no longer had to go
on-site with wiretapping equipment in order to tap a line�they could
monitor and digitally process voice communications from the comfort of
the home office. (The FCC has recently ruled that CALEA covers VOIP services, which means that providers like Vonage will have to find a way to comply.)
CALEA opened up a huge can of worms, and PGP creator Phil Zimmermann
sounded the alarm back in 1999 about where the program was headed:
A year after the CALEA passed, the FBI disclosed plans to require the
phone companies to build into their infrastructure the capacity to
simultaneously wiretap 1 percent of all phone calls in all major U.S.
cities. This would represent more than a thousandfold increase over
previous levels in the number of phones that could be wiretapped. In
previous years, there were only about a thousand court-ordered wiretaps
in the United States per year, at the federal, state, and local levels
combined. It's hard to see how the government could even employ enough
judges to sign enough wiretap orders to wiretap 1 percent of all our
phone calls, much less hire enough federal agents to sit and listen to
all that traffic in real time. The only plausible way of processing
that amount of traffic is a massive Orwellian application of automated
voice recognition technology to sift through it all, searching for
interesting keywords or searching for a particular speaker's voice. If
the government doesn't find the target in the first 1 percent sample,
the wiretaps can be shifted over to a different 1 percent until the
target is found, or until everyone's phone line has been checked for
subversive traffic. The FBI said they need this capacity to plan for
the future. This plan sparked such outrage that it was defeated in
Congress. But the mere fact that the FBI even asked for these broad
powers is revealing of their agenda.
Read the quote above carefully, and see if it doesn't ring any bells
for you. The salient points that Zimmermann makes are these:
In 1995, back when the Pentium Pro was hot stuff, the FBI
requested the legal authorization to do very high-volume monitoring of
digital calls.
There's no way for the judicial system to approve warrants for the number of calls that the FBI wanted to monitor.
The
agency could never hire enough humans to be able to monitor that many
calls simultaneously, which means that they'd have to use voice
recognition technology to look for "hits" that they could then follow
up on with human wiretaps.
It is entirely possible that the NSA technology at issue here is some
kind of high-volume, automated voice recognition and pattern matching
system. Now, I don't at all believe that all international calls are or
could be monitored with such a system, or anything like that. Rather,
the NSA could very easily narrow down the amount of phone traffic that
they'd have to a relatively small fraction of international calls with
some smart filtering. First, they'd only monitor calls where one end of
the connection is in a country of interest. Then, they'd only need the
ability to do a roving random sample of a few seconds from each call in
that already greatly narrowed pool of calls. As Zimmermann describes
above, you monitor a few seconds of some fraction of the calls looking
for "hits," and then you move on to another fraction. If a particular
call generates a hit, then you zero in on it for further real-time
analysis and possible human interception. All the calls can be
recorded, cached, and further examined later for items that may have
been overlooked in the real-time analysis.
In a recent press conference, Deputy Director for National Intelligence Michael Hayden said the following (via Defensetech):
And here the key is not so much persistence as it is agility. It's a
quicker trigger. It's a subtly softer trigger. And the intrusion into
privacy -- the intrusion into privacy is significantly less. It's only
international calls. The period of time in which we do this is, in most
cases, far less than that which would be gained by getting a court
order.
This sounds pretty much like what I've described above. And yes,
this kind of real-time voice recognition, crude semantic parsing and
pattern matching is doable with today's technology, especially when you
have a budget like the NSA.
The "softer trigger" here is a phrase that's on a watch list, or a
call with an abnormally high volume of a certain type of vocabulary.
The "agility" bit is a reference to the technology's ability to move
from call to call, taking small slices. That's also probably what's
behind the claim that the technology is less intrusive than a
traditional wiretap, because the time slices are very short.
Finally, I know a lot of people are bringing up Echelon here, and
Echelon is indeed relevant. However, the relevance isn't in how the NSA
program is connected to Echelon - it probably isn't - but in the fact that
Echelon is yet another example of a government-run, high-volume,
automated intelligence gathering project that looks for certain words
or phrases in samples of electronic communications.This really goes to the crux of the matter. Any "terrorist" worth his
salt would certainly have better tradecraft than to use any kind of
"plainly spoken" phrase that would be picked up by the government
filters. After all, we trained a lot of the people who trained these
people during the Soviet war in Afganistan, and I can't imagine the CIA
wouldn't teach them these simple principles of tradecraft.
You
might catch some of the "stupid" ones. Or the non-trained ones. Or the
home-grown ones not connected to a "professional" terrorist group. But,
you could probably catch those people through legal means too, and not
risk impeachment and public outrage. So, if not for terror (which seems
to be the administration's "stock" response for everything since 9/11),
then why?
The neo-con stated goal of ensuring Republican control of the country seems a likely candidate to me.
The implication of this type of surveillance is that you monitor
everyone. Or at least a huge chunk of them. Whether you think that is
right, wrong, justifiable, etc. it's obviously a massive change which
dictates a public discussion. But I suspect, or at least hope, that a
significan number of Americans would be genuinely opposed to such a
change in surveillence techniques. In my thinking, the fact that it
might be computers listening instead of people doesn't change the
nature of the privacy invasion. If anything, it makes it worse because
what would have been impossible with humans (listen to every single
phone call) because possible with computers.
Even if the article
is wrong in guessing that this is what's behind the current tiff, I do
think that this type of approach is coming if not already here. Take
for example 'roving wiretaps'. I haven't seen any discussion of how
exactly that works. It could very well involve tapping all phones in an
area a scanning for the voiceprint of the wiretap subject.
Another
example of late. The story about the student who got a visit from the
government for requesting a book by Mao for inter-library loan. If you
assume that the student was not already under surveillance, the only
way for that to happen is if the governement is monitoring all
inter-library loans. Which would certainly explain why they are so
tight lipped about the library record provisions in the Patriot act.
So to take a stab at making a "real world" layman's example of this
technology: This is basically like cops going around neighborhoods,
opening up your front door, and glancing around real fast to see if
there's anything suspicious. If they don't see anything, they move on
to the next house. If something doesn't look right, they hang around
and check things out more closely.
Sound about right? If that's
the case, then yeah, I can see why they
A) wouldn't want to go to
Congress to ask for a change in the law, and B) wouldn't want to try to
get a warrant for these.
In both cases, they'd be told to go fly a
kite. So, if this is the case, it's probably what I expected when the
story first broke. It's another case of "they might say no, so let's
not ask."
