What Is the Real Purpose of Bush's NSA Surveillance?

What Is the Real Purpose of Bush's NSA Surveillance?
Patriot Daily | Editorial

Thursday 18 May 2006

The Baltimore Sun reported today that Bush rejected President Clinton's effective, legal surveillance program that did not invade privacy to adopt the current NSA spying program, which is ineffective, illegal and invasive of citizens' privacy rights. So, the question jumping off the page may be: Why would Bush use a program that does not actually assist the finding of terrorists, yet also has the disadvantage of invading Americans' privacy rights?

The Clinton surveillance program, called ThinThread, was created during the late 1990s to "gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws." Several bloggers provide excellent posts on the components and nature of the program.

The key to evaluating Bush's true motive for his NSA program is that testing of ThinThread showed it was far better in finding potential threats and protecting privacy than the current NSA program that Bush chose in its stead. "For example, its ability to sort through massive amounts of data to find threat-related communications far surpassed the existing system, sources said. It also was able to rapidly separate and encrypt U.S.-related communications to ensure privacy." But, Gen. Hayden of NSA decided not to use these two tools or the monitoring feature to prevent abuse of the records. The problem is that not using the ThinThread program has "undermined the agency's ability to zero in on potential threats." Moreover, "ThinThread could have provided a simple solution to privacy concerns."

Incredibly, the ThinThread program was far superior to the NSA program in place in 2004:

A number of independent studies, including a classified 2004 report from the Pentagon's inspector-general, in addition to the successful pilot tests, found that the program provided 'superior processing, filtering and protection of U.S. citizens, and discovery of important and previously unknown targets,' said an intelligence official familiar with the program who described the reports to The Sun. The Pentagon report concluded that ThinThread's ability to sort through data in 2001 was far superior to that of another NSA system in place in 2004, and that the program should be launched and enhanced.

The upshot is that the NSA's warrantless surveillance program is ineffective at finding terrorists:

Without ThinThread's data-sifting assets, the warrantless surveillance program was left with a sub-par tool for sniffing out information, and that has diminished the quality of its analysis, according to intelligence officials. Sources say the NSA's existing system for data-sorting has produced a database clogged with corrupted and useless information. The mass collection of relatively unsorted data, combined with system flaws that sources say erroneously flag people as suspect, has produced numerous false leads, draining analyst resources, according to two intelligence officials. FBI agents have complained in published reports in The New York Times that NSA leads have resulted in numerous dead ends."
And, Bush did not adopt ThinThread's privacy protections even though the "encryption feature would have been simple to implement" in minutes. One explanation may be that "encryption would have required analysts to be more disciplined in their investigations, however, by forcing them to gather what a court would consider sufficient information to indicate possible terrorist activity before decryption could be authorized.

So, using ThinThread would have required compliance with legal search standards, something that the Decider says is just not technically feasible with his program. Sounds like a convenient method for chipping away at constitutional safeguards.

While Bush proclaims that his NSA program is for the purpose of finding terrorists, this article says it is not effective for that purpose. On the other hand, the former head of NSA operations division told the 9/11 Commission that "ThinThread could have identified the hijackers had it been in place before the attacks." Is that why Bush team often states that NSA surveillance would have permitted the identification and capture of the 9/11 hijackers had it been in place prior to 9/11? That is, the general statements made by Bush are true for ThinThread, which is a NSA surveillance program, just not the program that Bush is using. So, in accordance with Bush's parsing practice, his statements would be technically true, just misleadingly false.

Finally, the article points out that ThinThread was rejected partially because it too aggressive and could violate civil rights. After 9/11, NSA lawyers reversed position by adopting Bush's theory of his war powers. However, one intelligence official stated that ThinThread is legal regardless of whether the US is at war. So, did Bush reject ThinThread partially because he could not then use the terror card as a pretext to expand presidential powers?

Given that a perfectly legal program which could actually accomplish the stated objective of capturing terrorists before attacking Americans exists, but was rejected by Bush, would could be the real underlying purpose for Bush's NSA surveillance program that has a minor, if any, impact on anti-terror objectives?

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that if Bush is to actually succeed in finding terrorists with the program he is using, this program requires more data about Americans. That is, phone records are not sufficient for this objective, so more data would be required. Like the camel who first sticks its head in the tent, Bush may have wanted pretextual grounds to keep expanding the nature and amount of information about Americans that he collected and deposited in databases.

As noted by one expert, the NSA program Bush is using is apparently not effective at finding terrorists, not unless more data is obtained by the government in addition to phone records. Public reports indicate the NSA is using social network analysis to find terrorists, which is not effective without more data. If the NSA wants to use mathematics to root out terrorists, it would have to use a different type of profiling technique called formal concept analysis, which requires more than phone records: "For instance, you might group together people based on what cafes, bookstores and mosques they visit, and then find out that all the people who go to a certain cafe also attend the same mosque (but maybe not vice versa)."

Additional information indicates Bush wanted more than phone records. Statements by telecom company officials indicate that Bush wanted long-distance carriers, not local telecoms, which expands the nature and amount of information the NSA can obtain. Technical experts say long-distance calling records may provide information not only on long-distance customers but also "traffic that the carriers connect on behalf of others, including some calls placed on cellphones or on Internet voice connections."

Finally, the equipment that AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein says was installed by NSA in AT&T's secret switching room is apparently Narus, which has the capacity to be the "best internet spy tool:"

Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record," says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. "We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls.
* * *
The combination can keep track of, analyze and record nearly every form of internet communication, whether e-mail, instant message, video streams or VOIP phone calls that cross the network.

So, what is the real purpose of Bush's NSA spying program? Is terrorism being used as a cover to collect reams of information about Americans to establish a central database? Could there be political motives?

Given this history, is it such a stretch to think the White House might find this information useful in helping Republican candidates hold on to national power in 2008? You really think it would never occur to Bush or Karl Rove that private knowledge of which Democratic supporters were contributing to which candidates, or which campaign advisers were leaking to which reporters, would be an advantage in a tough campaign? Or that a little listen-in to their conversations might produce a few votes? We don't know that this thought ever crossed their minds, but there's so much we don't know about what they are thinking. So we just have to trust the integrity of the administration's public statements. Oh, goodie. Do you feel safer now?

Given that Bush rejected the ThinThread program that is reported to be both effective at finding terrorists and provide protection to privacy rights, one just has to wonder at the real reason for the NSA program.



Go to Original

NSA Killed System That Sifted Phone Data Legally
By Siobhan Gorman
The Baltimore Sun

Wednesday 17 May 2006

Sources say project was shelved in part because of bureaucratic infighting.

Washington - The National Security Agency developed a pilot program in the late 1990s that would have enabled it to gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, it shelved the project - not because it failed to work - but because of bureaucratic infighting and a sudden White House expansion of the agency's surveillance powers, according to several intelligence officials.

The agency opted instead to adopt only one component of the program, which produced a far less capable and rigorous program. It remains the backbone of the NSA's warrantless surveillance efforts, tracking domestic and overseas communications from a vast databank of information, and monitoring selected calls.

Four intelligence officials knowledgeable about the program agreed to discuss it with The Sun only if granted anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

The program the NSA rejected, called ThinThread, was developed to handle greater volumes of information, partly in expectation of threats surrounding the millennium celebrations. Sources say it bundled together four cutting-edge surveillance tools. ThinThread would have:

* Used more sophisticated methods of sorting through massive phone and e-mail data to identify suspect communications.

* Identified U.S. phone numbers and other communications data and encrypted them to ensure caller privacy.

* Employed an automated auditing system to monitor how analysts handled the information, in order to prevent misuse and improve efficiency.

* Analyzed the data to identify relationships between callers and chronicle their contacts. Only when evidence of a potential threat had been developed would analysts be able to request decryption of the records.

An agency spokesman declined to discuss NSA operations.

"Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to discuss actual or alleged operational issues as it would give those wishing to do harm to the U.S. insight and potentially place Americans in danger," said NSA spokesman Don Weber in a statement to The Sun

"However, it is important to note that NSA takes its legal responsibilities very seriously and operates within the law."

In what intelligence experts describe as rigorous testing of ThinThread in 1998, the project succeeded at each task with high marks. For example, its ability to sort through massive amounts of data to find threat-related communications far surpassed the existing system, sources said. It also was able to rapidly separate and encrypt U.S.-related communications to ensure privacy.

But the NSA, then headed by Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, opted against both of those tools, as well as the feature that monitored potential abuse of the records. Only the data analysis facet of the program survived and became the basis for the warrantless surveillance program.

The decision, which one official attributed to "turf protection and empire building," has undermined the agency's ability to zero in on potential threats, sources say. In the wake of revelations about the agency's wide gathering of U.S. phone records, they add, ThinThread could have provided a simple solution to privacy concerns.

A number of independent studies, including a classified 2004 report from the Pentagon's inspector-general, in addition to the successful pilot tests, found that the program provided "superior processing, filtering and protection of U.S. citizens, and discovery of important and previously unknown targets," said an intelligence official familiar with the program who described the reports to The Sun. The Pentagon report concluded that ThinThread's ability to sort through data in 2001 was far superior to that of another NSA system in place in 2004, and that the program should be launched and enhanced.

Hayden, the president's nominee to lead the CIA, is to appear Thursday before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and is expected to face tough questioning about the warrantless surveillance program, the collection of domestic phone records and other NSA programs.

While the furor over warrantless surveillance, particularly collection of domestic phone records, has raised questions about the legality of the program, there has been little or no discussion about how it might be altered to eliminate such concerns.

ThinThread was designed to address two key challenges: The NSA had more information than it could digest, and, increasingly, its targets were in contact with people in the United States whose calls the agency was prohibited from monitoring.

With the explosion of digital communications, especially phone calls over the Internet and the use of devices such as BlackBerries, the NSA was struggling to sort key nuggets of information from the huge volume of data it took in.

By 1999, as some NSA officials grew increasingly concerned about millennium-related security, ThinThread seemed in position to become an important tool with which the NSA could prevent terrorist attacks. But it was never launched. Neither was it put into effect after the attacks in 2001. Despite its success in tests, ThinThread's information-sorting system was viewed by some in the agency as a competitor to Trailblazer, a $1.2 billion program that was being developed with similar goals. The NSA was committed to Trailblazer, which later ran into trouble and has been essentially abandoned.

Both programs aimed to better sort through the sea of data to find key tips to the next terrorist attack, but Trailblazer had more political support internally because it was initiated by Hayden when he first arrived at the NSA, sources said.

NSA managers did not want to adopt the data-sifting component of ThinThread out of fear that the Trailblazer program would be outperformed and "humiliated," an intelligence official said.

Without ThinThread's data-sifting assets, the warrantless surveillance program was left with a sub-par tool for sniffing out information, and that has diminished the quality of its analysis, according to intelligence officials.

Sources say the NSA's existing system for data-sorting has produced a database clogged with corrupted and useless information.

The mass collection of relatively unsorted data, combined with system flaws that sources say erroneously flag people as suspect, has produced numerous false leads, draining analyst resources, according to two intelligence officials. FBI agents have complained in published reports in The New York Times that NSA leads have resulted in numerous dead ends.

The privacy protections offered by ThinThread were also abandoned in the post-Sept. 11 push by the president for a faster response to terrorism.

Once President Bush gave the go-ahead for the NSA to secretly gather and analyze domestic phone records - an authorization that carried no stipulations about identity protection - agency officials regarded the encryption as an unnecessary step and rejected it, according to two intelligence officials knowledgeable about ThinThread and the warrantless surveillance programs.

"They basically just disabled the [privacy] safeguards," said one intelligence official.

Another, a former top intelligence official, said that without a privacy requirement, "there was no reason to go back to something that was perhaps more difficult to implement."

However two officials familiar with the program said the encryption feature would have been simple to implement. One said the time required would have involved minutes, not hours.

Encryption would have required analysts to be more disciplined in their investigations, however, by forcing them to gather what a court would consider sufficient information to indicate possible terrorist activity before decryption could be authorized.

While it is unclear why the agency dropped the component that monitored for abuse of records, one intelligence official noted that the feature was not popular with analysts. It not only tracked the use of the database, but hunted for the most effective analysis techniques, and some analysts thought it would be used to judge their performance.

Within the NSA, the primary advocate for the ThinThread program was Richard Taylor, who headed the agency's operations division. Taylor who has retired from the NSA, did not return calls seeking comment.

Officials say that after the successful tests of ThinThread in 1998, Taylor argued that the NSA should implement the full program. He later told the 9/11 Commission that ThinThread could have identified the hijackers had it been in place before the attacks, according to an intelligence expert close to the commission.

But at the time, NSA lawyers viewed the program as too aggressive. At that point, the NSA's authority was limited strictly to overseas communications, with the FBI responsible for analyzing domestic calls. The lawyers feared that expanding NSA data collection to include communications in the United States could violate civil liberties, even with the encryption function.

Taylor had an intense meeting with Hayden and NSA lawyers. "It was a very emotional debate," recalled a former intelligence official. "Eventually it was rejected by [NSA] lawyers."

After the 2001 attacks, the NSA lawyers who had blocked the program reversed their position and approved the use of the program without the enhanced technology to sift out terrorist communications and without the encryption protections.

The NSA's new legal analysis was based on the commander in chief's powers during war, said former officials familiar with the program. The Bush administration's defense has rested largely on that argument since the warrantless surveillance program became public in December.

The strength of ThinThread's approach is that by encrypting information on Americans, it is legal regardless of whether the country is at war, according to one intelligence official.

Officials familiar with Thin Thread say some within NSA were stunned by the legal flip-flop. ThinThread "was designed very carefully from a legal point of view, so that even in non-wartime, you could have done it legitimately," the official said.

In a speech in January, Hayden said the warrantless surveillance program was not only limited to al-Qaida communications, but carefully implemented with an eye toward preserving the Constitution and rights of Americans.

"As the director, I was the one responsible to ensure that this program was limited in its scope and disciplined in its application," he said.

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