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May 19, 2006

NSA Story Has Media Confused, Carried Away

By Dennis Byrne

Not that it matters that three giant phone companies said they didn't do it, they stand convicted of turning over the personal phone records of hundreds of millions of Americans talking to their Aunt Millies.

All we have to go on is a story in USA Today that, while long in words, is thin on facts. Nothing about how the National Security Agency actually monitors billions of phone calls. Nothing about how they aggregate the data. Nothing about what data they're aggregating. Nothing about what they do with it. No confirmation that the story was even close to accurate.

All we know is that President George W. Bush has done it again--committed an immoral outrage against all Americans by "listening in" to their conversations.

"I signed up for a new calling plan today -- the 'NSA Friends and Family' plan. For $100 a month, they listen to all my friends and all my family." --Jay Leno

"If the government has been monitoring my phone conversations, by God, they should be paying half of my phone sex bill." --David Letterman

Bush's approval rating has fallen into the 20s -- 29 percent in the latest poll. I tell you. It's hard out there for a chimp. ... He says he doesn't pay attention to the polls. If he wants to know what the American people are thinking, he'll listen to your calls." --Bill Maher

(A hat tip to Daniel Kurtzman at Political Humor)

The allegedly illegal "data mining" or "link mining" that the NSA is accused of doing has somehow become in the public mind (and in the minds of some journalists, apparently) actual eavesdropping on phone conversations. As we make appointments with our doctors, book airline tickets, find a baby sitter, call a plumber or dial up our bookie.

Thusly carried away with a vague impression of what actually is going on, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, for one, thundered about NSA "bugging" the phones and e-mail of American citizens. Boy, the paper implied, we hope the Senate Intelligence Committee nails Gov. Michael V. Hayden, former head of the NSA, during its hearings into his nomination as new CIA director.

Never mind that the data mining is considered legal by some experts, and clearly is not eavesdropping on Americans. Yet, the newspaper calls it "apparently patently unlawful." Such a statement disregards the assertion that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) does not address data mining, or prohibit it.

What's as scary as the claimed threats to privacy is the incomprehensible acceptance of the idea that someone, anyone, could effectively listen in to 200 million customers making what the FCC said was 463 billion domestic phone calls in 2004. Supercomputers can do a lot of things, but I doubt that differentiating whether you're calling in sick or calling a terrorist is one of them.

Mind you, this entire debate is being conducted as the companies deny that they have ever participated in the program. Of course, when so many agenda journalists regard any statement by Big Business as an outright lie, I guess we shouldn't consider the possibility that none of this ever happened.

What's needed is thoughtful explanation of the difference between eavesdropping ("listening in on") of the kind the NSA is accused of doing, and the much more complicated "data mining." The best explanation I saw was a May 12 article in the Chicago Tribune, by reporter Jon Van: "Right questions key to data mining
Finding phone links possible but difficult." He wrote:

Connecting the dots is difficult, but for homeland security agents, the real trick is figuring out where the dots are and which ones need connecting.

That analogy may be at the core of the federal government's interest in keeping tabs on telephone calls Americans make to each other every day. Government agents reportedly hope that computers can sift through the mountains of phone data to extract nuggets of information revealing terrorist plotters.

Only within the past decade has a subset of computer science called link mining even become available to attempt such a daunting task, though some researchers believe that even the most powerful computers will never deliver the answers that the government seeks.

Congressional leaders were demanding answers from the Bush administration Thursday about a specific type of connecting-the-dots activity: whether the secretive National Security Agency had collected extensive phone call records, and whether the privacy rights of individuals had been violated.

Behind those questions is the arcane science of using superpowerful computers to mine data of all types for information.

"It's a massive data problem, but you can do it," said Kris Hammond, a Northwestern University professor of electrical engineering and computer science. "If it were impossible to get specific answers to specific questions from a huge database, Google couldn't exist."

Van explains the difficulty of making any sense of the billions of calls made by Americans. A key to doing it is asking the right question, such as: "What mobile phones in Washington, D.C. made calls to Tehran during a given period, and whether calls were made from those phones to San Francisco during the same period?" Hammond added that if all you're doing is looking for patterns without asking such specific questions, you'd find millions of patterns.

Social scientists have used this kind of "link mining" to study gossip and other interpersonal systems and a variation of it is used by search engines, such as Google, to find information from a huge, otherwise unmanageable, database.

Despite all this confusion, Americans show some surprising support for what many may actually believe is eavesdropping. An ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 63 percent said it was an acceptable way to fight terrorism.

And so it is.

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