News Feature

What's Up at the NSA?

December 20, 2005 — CIO —

The President and members of Congress have begun to speak publicly about the NSA domestic spying program the New York Times broke last week. No concrete new details about the program have come out, but I think there are enough clues in the language the President and other have used that the outlines of the program are emerging. What I’m about to engage in is purely speculative – I have no inside sources or information about the program that hasn’t been published elsewhere. But if you’ll permit me to strap on my tinfoil hat, this is what I think is happening.

My guess is that the NSA is intercepting broad swaths of communications – emails, phone calls, etc. – and that they have sophisticated data mining software that lets them sift through everything to see of there is anything they deem suspicious. A new technology would explain a few of the comments made by people familiar with the program. The website defensetech.org has picked up a couple of these. First, former Senator Bob Graham, who was chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee when the NSA program started, in Sunday’s Washington Post:

"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.

Next we have a statement from Bill Keller, the New York Times’ executive editor:

"[W]e 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."

That’s two mentions of a new technology. The next puzzle piece is Senator Jay Rockefeller’s cryptic handwritten letter to Vice President Cheney in which he compares the NSA program to the Total Information Awareness project that the Defense Department experimented with a few years ago. That program was essentially a large scale data mining project aimed at collecting commercial information and scouring it for connections that might point to a terrorist. I wrote about Total Information Awareness, which was subsequently shut down in the face of negative public opinion, a few years ago in an article about the Patriot Act. I’ve since encountered enough government sponsored data mining programs to know that Total Information Awareness was just one of many.

In that article I also detailed a new mindset among law enforcement officials. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

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