Not Mining Or Trolling

(revision: 1.1)

The President says the NSA isn't "mining or trolling" the telephone call records they got from the local exchanges carriers. Now, I know a lot of people in Left Blogovia are blowing a raspberry at that and calling bullshit, but I think I believe him. What the President isn't telling you is why the fsck the NSA demanded the records if they weren't planning to mine them for statistical information.

What do you do with databases? You cross-correlate them with other databases, that's what you do with them. What other data does the NSA have that they would want to cross-correlate with call records taken from the local exchange carriers? Duh. They've got petabytes and petabytes of storage filled with raw dumps of the digital traffic on the international lines. All those bits might seem pretty mysterious without some way of figuring out which particular bearer channel was used to carry the call you want to snoop, but it isn't quite as troublesome as you might think.

The raw feeds contain all the signaling traffic. Prior to the use of this illegal wiretapping program, if they caught a particularly juicy conversation with a digital voice analyzer on a transoceanic fiber or one of the trunk lines into Canada or Mexico, they could back out the terminal identifiers on each of the call, get the phone numbers associated with them, look at everything else in the archive to or from those terminals, lather, rinse and repeat until they were clawing their ears off in boredom. They could also cross-correlate the phone numbers with personal identity records obtainable from open sources and have a pretty good idea who was saying what. More importantly, they could start with a name and get a record of everything that person has said on an international fiber from a phone known to be in that person's control.

Now, they'd like to be able to do this with all the domestic traffic, because— hey, who wouldn't want to be able to listen in on everything Seymour Hersh's editorial assistants say on the telephone?— and that would require a hell of a lot more storage and computational power, but the really annoying thing preventing them from doing it is the logistics of getting all that raw data from such an expanded array of sources without comprimising operational security. But the signaling traffic, on the other hand— that, they could get easy. If it weren't for that annoying FISA law.

It would be nice if the Senate were to take seriously the idea of investigating the complicity of the local exchange carriers in this illegal wiretapping program. In addition to feeding NSA with a real-time flow of all signaling traffic through their switches, they are also journaling the raw traffic into local offline storage (as opposed to how it's done for the international traffic, i.e. in secure data centers at the NSA headquarters). The collection of all that raw data is, at least ostensibly, done in compliance with CALEA and ECPA, but that shouldn't give you much comfort.

What we almost certainly have here is NSA illegally getting a real-time feed of the signaling traffic for all domestic telephone calls, which they can then use to index the call content collected at the local exchanges for CALEA compliance. If this were a country still operating under the Rule of Law, then the NSA would have to convince someone in the DOJ to go to a judge and ask for the local carrier to feed them real-time notifications of call events to specific terminals identified in the authorization to tap. Now, they aren't bothering with any of that. If you're on their list, maybe because CIFA doesn't like your sense of humor, then NSA gets notifications of every call you make, within seconds of you making them. No judge, no warrant, no cops, no oversight, no rules of any kind.

The good news is that, even though the USA PATRIOT Act amended the Wiretap Act of 1968 to make it more of a rubber-stamp affair to get a wiretap warrant for the actual call content, they still have to get a judge somewhere— any federal judge will do, actually— to agree that you're probably a terrorist before they can actually listen in on your phone sex. The information is that once they can monitor the signaling traffic from your cell phone without a court order, they'll know everything about you worth knowing, i.e. where you are, what you're doing, who you're talking with, and how to build a case for the judge about how you're probably a terrorist.

That's a nice police state you got there, Red State— sure would be a shame if someone were to scratch the paint on it.

Update 1.1: Glenn Greenwald covers the legal issues. One point I would like to make that isn't getting a lot of attention anywhere I've seen: the signaling data for mobile phones includes more than just what calls are made to and from the phone, but also handoffs between cells— and, my personal favorite: Global Positioning System notifications.

So. The next time you show up for a political demonstration, you have a choice: A) leave your phone turned off, or B) allow the President to have a list of names of everyone in the crowd with you. Just in case that information might turn out useful in proving that you associated with, you know, questionable people. Be seeing you.