Yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran a piece detailing the extensive program of data sweeping and data mining that is presently being conducted by the NSA:

According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called “transactional” data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns

Naturally, this sort of practice runs smack-dab against a variety of privacy concerns, not least among them the 4th Amendment, which serves to protect Americans from unreasonable search and seizure and requires particularization - which is intended to curtail broad information dragnets.

Others have commented on the creeping totalitarianism inherent in this program as well as the nature of the “surveillance society” - two very important issues. And largely these are solid positions and concerns. It’s not chicken-little scare mongering. The programs are here. Now.


As is pointed out in the WSJ and elsewhere, the main problem with this program is the fact that it is being conducted clandestinely and without sufficient public debate.

Also, the value of privacy as a public good is not taken into account and how this erosion of privacy might have negative effects on the associational patterns of Americans who might feel nervous about being erroneously linked with a terrorist group. This is what makes the program so dangerous is that the wide dragnet could have such a deep set of side effects.

The article also discusses the powerful social network analysis techniques that are used to generate leads for further investigation. While they may be powerful, they are not always precise and definitely have the potential to wrongly profile individuals who might share a network position similar to that of a known terrorist. Surely, there must be better ways to map terrorist networks than broadly sweeping the data of American citizens.

One more point is that the practice also introduce potential legal liability to government(which is not allowed to share data so freely between agencies) as well as private companies that choose to disclose private information to third parties. Which probably explains the whole sticking point behind recent calls for immunity for telcos who illegally aided government.

This is definitely one to watch and pay attention to.

[via Schneier on Security]

photo by Dave Bullock

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 11:58 am and is filed under Networks, Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.