How Government Uses Phone Data Uncertain

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It's hard to tell what government agents are doing with millions of domestic phone call records until there are answers to basic questions about what data they are getting, such as how old the records are. Even critics acknowledge that having the records of every domestic phone call in the United States might help speed the age-old police tactic of pursuing a lead, but it might instead swamp investigators with false leads while opening the way for possible police-state-style abuses.

It all depends on exactly what records the National Security Agency is getting from phone companies. Qwest Communications' ex-CEO Joseph Nacchio said through his attorney the government wanted ``private telephone records of Qwest customers,'' but he turned the requests down as violating federal privacy law. USA Today said NSA has the records of all the calls made by customers of AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth since sometime shortly after Sept. 11, 2001. The Los Angeles Times said NSA got a direct hookup to AT&T's ``Daytona'' database, which it said tracks ``the telephone numbers on both ends of calls as well as the duration of all landline calls.''

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Computer security expert Bruce Schneier, author of ``Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World,'' explains the problem this way: Assume the software is very accurate and produces just one false lead in every 100 queries and misses one real lead in every 1,000 queries. Assume the software sifts through 1 trillion entries - about 10 phone calls, e-mails and Web destinations a day for every person in the country - and assume there are 10 real plots. ``This system will generate 1 billion false alarms for every real terrorist plot it uncovers. Every day of every year, the police will have to investigate 27 million potential plots in order to find the one real terrorist plot per month.''

The New York Times reported that NSA's previously disclosed warrantless monitoring of actual telephone calls between this country and suspected terrorists in foreign countries spat out thousands of tips that turned out to be false alarms. ``If either of these programs had caught someone, they would have been bragging about it by now,'' Schneier said.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5818709,00.html

[ShortnFiery]

1. They should NOT have the data, that's the point. n/t

[struggle4progress]

2. I'd wager they're collecting data on their "enemies": vegetarians, ..

.. peace activists, "terrorists" in the NEA, environmentalists p!ssed about cell phone towers in Yellowstone ...

They're going to identify the grassroots networks: who knows who, which national organizations they call on for help, who their lawyers are, who has a porn or gambling problem -- in short, everything they need to know to purge the country of opposition ...

[havocmom]

3. Some of my musings and questions on the subject from this morning

"So, did they use our tax money to pay the phone companies for lists of all the calls we made? Boy, bet that came to a chunk of change. No wonder most of the phone company lawyers found nothing to worry about in regard to the legality of such wholesale intrusion (sans warrants) on the privacy of tens of millions of Americans. Must’ve been some big-ass checks handed out for that data.

Tens of millions calls or people? Whew dawgie! Either way, it is a lot of us. How many of us voted DEM in 2000 and 2004? How many of us have written LTTE and emails to our congressmen? They bought phone records for tens of millions of us?

Surely they wouldn’t just sit down and read lists of all the calls all of us made, cross-referencing and looking for patterns. They have huge computers for that, don’t they? So maybe no real, actual humans peer at whom I call? The real people just get a heads up if the computer notices me calling the number of a known terrorist, right?

But, say I apply for a job with some government agency and they wanted to know a lot more about me than what they can legally ask on an application. Could they punch my name or phone number into their big computer and have it spit out information about all my calls? Or, say I was a member of Congress (or other governmental body) and somewhat independent minded, would they print out a list of all the people I called and share it with my spouse, banker, or the press? Even private calls I might wanna keep to myself? Would I vote the way they wanted to spare myself the hassles and financial hit of a divorce if I had a special friend on the side? What would I do to keep everything in my life out of the press?

Would they give data to any big corporation/contributor which might want know more about me than they could legally ask on an application for a job, or credit? Would the NSA just give out that info or would they charge for it, since they have other things they could do with a little mad-money Congress didn’t appropriate to them. Then they could do stuff Congress wouldn’t even know about with that extra cash."

more of my brand of phone tag questions

[struggle4progress]

4. Yup: monopoly capitalism and the technofascists.