What other programs are the NSA geeks runnning?

Pundits worldwide are wondering just what other programs the NSA might have running, other than the single one Attorney General Gonzales was so adamant about keeping the intelligence committee focused on.

Before we can elucidate further, we need to know a little about how the NSA works. In a nutshell, the manner in which it works is also the reason why what they do is illegal within our national borders, and why Ashcroft said no to that warrantless wiretapping program.

The Agency’s mission

Pay attention now: NSA is chartered by the National Security Act of 1947 (as amended)[1] to conduct foreign military sigint only, but may assist civilian law enforcement officials thus:

NSA of 1947, ASSISTANCE TO UNITED STATES LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES, SEC. 105A.. [50 U.S.C. 403-5a] (a) AUTHORITY TO PROVIDE ASSISTANCE. - Subject to subsection (b), elements of the intelligence community may, upon the request of a United States law enforcement agency, collect information outside the United States about individuals who are not United States persons. Such elements may collect such information notwithstanding that the law enforcement agency intends to use the information collected for purposes of a law enforcement investigation or counterintelligence investigation.

Again: “outside the United States” and, “individuals who are not United States persons.”

Broadly speaking, NSA has two jobs: 1) intercept foreign military communications, and 2) decipher code. They are really good at both jobs. FISA was later specifically crafted to allow them to listen domestically when the origination point was either domestic or foreign, as long as there was some foreign node involved, but only with a warrant, eg, a FISA warrant. Notwithstanding FISA, there is no mention in NSA 1947 (as amended and published as of this morning) of any amendment redirecting their exclusive targets as being foreign only, or including US persons.

The hardware

All electrical communications devices emit electromagnetic radiation, which can be sent over wires or broadcast through the air. We’re talking telephones, fax, the Internet, TV, radio, everything. It’s no big deal for anybody with sufficiently sensitive equipment to pick up these signals, which is all that the NSA is doing on the mechanical side.

Their program for the harvesting of foreign military signals is called ECHELON. It is basically a world-spanning, ground and space-based network of antennas, picking electronic signals out of the ether, amplifying them and sending them to Ft. George Meade, Virginia, where the signals are processed by a program called DICTIONARY.

The program also uses feeds from physical wiretaps on the trans-Atlantic cable lying on the ocean floor. This program had been highly classified in the past, but after James Bamford’s book Puzzle Palace came out, most of this information became common knowledge and partially declassified; some of the flavors of the search modes were re-named though, and certain quasi-legal programs initiated.

The Atlantic cable tap was code-word Top Secret for years, even though it was known by the NSA brass to be illegal to listen to domestically-originated traffic. Still, the equipment was crude and filtering software non-existent, so it couldn’t be helped, and anyway, it was the height of the Cold War, their target was the USSR, and no-one - particularly the Congressional intelligence oversight committee - was making any fuss. But the physical equipment was in place, and the precedent - the physical act of eavesdropping on US citizens by a quasi-military organization - had been set.

The foreign sigint programs are arguably legal under US law, although some European nations are still vociferously objecting to the “harvesting” of their military and commercial/economic sigint. Previously, all of NSA’s efforts were directed at foreign countries (mainly USSR, but particularly France). In the past, NSA was almost completely inactive domestically, which is why they recently had to build those switching rooms in AT&T’s San Francisco and St Louis facilities.

One of the programs that Gonzales alluded to (even if he didn’t know he doing so) is a side program in which the NSA and CIA acquire foreign commercial traffic which they had shared with the US Chamber of Commerce through the “Office of Intelligence Liason.” After the BBC revealed this program in a UK televison broadcast in 1993, the name was changed to the “Office of Executive Support,” which works for the National Economic Council, established by President Clinton that same year.[2]

Illegally, because - again - they are not allowed to monitor traffic that is not military. But one can see how monitoring commercial traffic (foreign corporations’ coded communications) can come in handy when a big trade bill is coming up, or Airbus is making a run against Boeing, or Raytheon is competing against CF-Thompson. Again, another precedent was set which doesn’t seem to violate any US civil liberties, helps American business, and another way for the NSA to keep their funding going after the end of the Cold War.

I believe it is very important to note a semantic problem at this point: are terrorist actions “military” or civil? This is an important distinction, because the NSA charter mandates they monitor military foreign traffic only. Parsing the definition of “civil/terrorist” v. “military” signals traffic is probably where Ashcroft began to have trouble with the NSA wiretap programs. It certainly gave the Church committee fits.

The FBI’s dragnet

The FBI has had a domestic monitoring program for years, code-named CARNIVORE, which has its own troubled history. The FBI is chartered for counter-terrorism domestically, and the NSA would have no legal objections to co-operating in technical matters with the DoJ, sort of lending a helping hand in the cops-and-robbers department. NSA geeks sleep well at night, knowing that the FBI *always* gets a warrant before they wiretap anybody.

Well, maybe not. The Church hearings back in the seventies called into being FISA, also shut down the *DoD’s* domestic Total Information Awareness program (well, maybe - $40 billion a year goes into Pentagon “black projects” and nary an accountant in sight) and imposed stricter controls on FBI’s CARNIVORE - again, maybe.

The software

The NSA’s DICTIONARY is a search algorithm, kind of like what Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, and other search engine sites use. In fact, the NSA has applied to the US Patent Office for a patent on the kernel of DICTIONARY’s algorithm. The FBI’s CARNIVORE uses a variation of DICTIONARY. ECHELON, TIA and CARNIVORE are all data-mining operations, which result in huge databases.

The only real secret about NSA’s search capability is not the fact that they exist, but rather the code names. And since we do know that they exist, we can extrapolate the sophistication of the enterprise just by comparing DICTIONARY to what Google does in matching AdSense or Google Ads to typical search engine results. There is no practical difference. In fact, Google may have the better search engine.

So here is the real nut of the problem: as anyone who has actually looked at the ads that Google presents to you as a reward for your search for “widgets” knows, the results are, to be fair, mixed.

The NSA has the same problem. If they intercept a person talking on the phone about exploding piñatas, however innocent the conversation may be, as a conversation about explosions the program tosses the phone call, email, whatever, into the bin along with the conversations of members of the 9/11 survivors’ group, say, or Fourth of July celebrants, as well as the principals of the Golden Gate Bridge explosion plot, and about ten thousand other conversations to boot.

But they have one more problem that Google or Yahoo doesn’t, and here’s where the practical and legal problems arise.

Bear in mind that all modern electronic signals are broadband multiplexed. In order to first get even *one* of those conversations, unless they are actually tracking a particular phone number (eg, have the bad guy’s landline telephone number, or computer IP or MAC address), they perforce must sift through through *every other signal* that is piggybacked with the one and only signal that they really want.

So, because of multiplexing, in order to get the one desired signal, they have to listen (sift through) one thousand conversations; in order to get a thousand, they have to listen to two hundred thousand, etc. In a weird way, we are all on a planet-wide telephone multiple-party line.

To illustrate: the Feds have a tip that an operational al-Qaeda cell is located somewhere in a city block. They want to intercept the telephones calls of that cell. Unless they know the apartment number of that cell, they have to eavesdrop on every telephone call on that block, which could be upwards of ten thousand people in a place like New York City, for example.

That’s information overload folks, with a vengeance. It’s also why we call it data-mining, dragneting or trawling. And to make it even worse, it’s probably useless and a huge waste of the taxpayers’ money.

Still, in the drive to build ECHELON, TALON, DICTIONARY, CARNIVORE & TIA, they created astonishingly powerful database software programs, which, should ever a bad guy get in charge of this country, would come in mighty handy for you-know-what.

The NSA geeks also sleep well at night because they justify their data-mining by their practice of *not looking* at the traffic with “human eyeballs.” It’s just a *machine* reading your mail or listening to your electronic chatter, they tell us.

One final point. Remember the signal tap rooms in San Francisco and St Louis; I can understand and justify the SF node - that’s an interception point for traffic to the Far East, logically required for legal monitoring of foreign telephony, but the only reason for a tap in St Louis is to monitor US interstate phone and e-mail traffic, and that means illegal domestic data-trawling, no matter how they parse it.

To sum up: not only are they listening to the bad guys, they are listening to you, too, and that’s illegal, and that’s why they need a warrant, no matter how loudly they scream “national security.”

—————–

References

[1] National Security Act of 1947 (as amended) http://www.intelligence.gov/0-natsecact_1947.shtml
[2] Development of Surveillance Technology and Risk of Abuse of Economic Information. part 2/5 (pdf), publication of European Parliament, STOA Panel, Luxembourg, 1999

2 other stories on electronic surveillance are:

http://realityframe.blogspot.com/2006/02/advise-another- massive-government.html
http://counterterrorismblog.org/2006/06/ reports_of_us_monitoring_of_sw.php

http://warrenreports.tpmcafe.com

RSS TrackBack URL

Translate: