[WSIS CS-Plenary] Merry Xmas brought to you by the NSA

[Dr. Francis MUGUET]

Merry Xmas brought to you by the NSA

No wonder they do not like the idea of
local internet exchange gateways...
Has the WGIG missed something... ?
(one more item,
 among the many things they did miss )

Have fun !

Francis

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/24/politics/24spy.html
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December 24, 2005


  Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report

By ERIC LICHTBLAU 
<http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=ERIC%20LICHTBLAU&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=ERIC%20LICHTBLAU&inline=nyt-per> 
and JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 - The National Security Agency has traced and 
analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing 
into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program 
that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt 
for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former 
government officials.

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.

The government's collection and analysis of phone and Internet traffic 
have raised questions among some law enforcement and judicial officials 
familiar with the program. One issue of concern to the Foreign 
Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reviewed some separate 
warrant applications growing out of the N.S.A.'s surveillance program, 
is whether the court has legal authority over calls outside the United 
States that happen to pass through American-based telephonic "switches," 
according to officials familiar with the matter.

"There was a lot of discussion about the switches" in conversations with 
the court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the gateways 
through which much of the communications traffic flows. "You're talking 
about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question 
was, How do you minimize something that's on a switch that's carrying 
such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about 
that."

Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance 
program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his 
executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to 
the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications 
involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, 
besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed 
through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of 
patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe 
the program as a large data-mining operation.

The current and former government officials who discussed the program 
were granted anonymity because it remains classified.

Bush administration officials declined to comment on Friday on the 
technical aspects of the operation and the N.S.A.'s use of broad 
searches to look for clues on terrorists. Because the program is highly 
classified, many details of how the N.S.A. is conducting it remain 
unknown, and members of Congress who have pressed for a full 
Congressional inquiry say they are eager to learn more about the 
program's operational details, as well as its legality.

Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have 
knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze 
communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling 
whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and 
the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls 
to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of 
particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the 
officials said.

This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States 
would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government 
wanted to trace who calls whom.

The use of similar data-mining operations by the Bush administration in 
other contexts has raised strong objections, most notably in connection 
with the Total Information Awareness system, developed by the Pentagon 
for tracking terror suspects, and the Department of Homeland Security's 
Capps program for screening airline passengers. Both programs were 
ultimately scrapped after public outcries over possible threats to 
privacy and civil liberties.

But the Bush administration regards the N.S.A.'s ability to trace and 
analyze large volumes of data as critical to its expanded mission to 
detect terrorist plots before they can be carried out, officials 
familiar with the program say. Administration officials maintain that 
the system set up by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence 
Surveillance Act does not give them the speed and flexibility to respond 
fully to terrorist threats at home.

A former technology manager at a major telecommunications company said 
that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the industry 
have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the 
federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists.

"All that data is mined with the cooperation of the government and 
shared with them, and since 9/11, there's been much more active 
involvement in that area," said the former manager, a telecommunications 
expert who did not want his name or that of his former company used 
because of concern about revealing trade secrets.

Such information often proves just as valuable to the government as 
eavesdropping on the calls themselves, the former manager said.

"If they get content, that's useful to them too, but the real plum is 
going to be the transaction data and the traffic analysis," he said. 
"Massive amounts of traffic analysis information - who is calling whom, 
who is in Osama Bin Laden's 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/osama_bin_laden/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 
circle of family and friends - is used to identify lines of 
communication that are then given closer scrutiny."

Several officials said that after President Bush's order authorizing the 
N.S.A. program, senior government officials arranged with officials of 
some of the nation's largest telecommunications companies to gain access 
to switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United 
States' communications networks and international networks. The 
identities of the corporations involved could not be determined.

The switches are some of the main arteries for moving voice and some 
Internet traffic into and out of the United States, and, with the 
globalization of the telecommunications industry in recent years, many 
international-to-international calls are also routed through such 
American switches.

One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at 
the N.S.A. said that to exploit its technological capabilities, the 
American government had in the last few years been quietly encouraging 
the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international 
traffic that is routed through American-based switches.

The growth of that transit traffic had become a major issue for the 
intelligence community, officials say, because it had not been fully 
addressed by 1970's-era laws and regulations governing the N.S.A. Now 
that foreign calls were being routed through switches on American soil, 
some judges and law enforcement officials regarded eavesdropping on 
those calls as a possible violation of those decades-old restrictions, 
including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires 
court-approved warrants for domestic surveillance.

Historically, the American intelligence community has had close 
relationships with many communications and computer firms and related 
technical industries. But the N.S.A.'s backdoor access to major 
telecommunications switches on American soil with the cooperation of 
major corporations represents a significant expansion of the agency's 
operational capability, according to current and former government 
officials.

Phil Karn, a computer engineer and technology expert at a major West 
Coast telecommunications company, said access to such switches would be 
significant. "If the government is gaining access to the switches like 
this, what you're really talking about is the capability of an enormous 
vacuum operation to sweep up data," he said.

-- 

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Francis F. MUGUET Ph.D 

MDPI Foundation Open Access Journals
Associate Publisher
http://www.mdpi.org   http://www.mdpi.net
muguet at mdpi.org       muguet at mdpi.net

ENSTA   Paris, France
KNIS lab.  Director 
"Knowledge Networks & Information Society" (KNIS)
muguet at ensta.fr   http://www.ensta.fr/~muguet

World Summit On the Information Society (WSIS)
Civil Society Working Groups
Scientific Information :  http://www.wsis-si.org  chair
Patents & Copyrights   :  http://www.wsis-pct.org co-chair
Financing Mechanismns  :  http://www.wsis-finance.org web

UNMSP project : http://www.unmsp.org
WTIS initiative: http://www.wtis.org
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