FISA: Grill the Executives
Threat Level has posted an intriguing interview with Russell Tice from 2006. Tice provides a better idea of how some of the sorting might have happened.
Tice: Say you’re pretty sure you’re looking for terrorists, and you’re pretty sure that the percentage of women terrorists as opposed to men is pretty [small]. So you just filter out all female voices. And there’s a way to determine whether the signature of the voice is male or female. So, boom, you get rid of 50 percent of your information just by filtering there. Then from your intelligence work you realize that most terrorists never talk more than two minutes. So any conversation more than two minutes, you immediately filter that out. You start winnowing down what you’re looking for.
Q: Without really knowing what it is you’re looking for?
Tice: Right. And if you can develop a machine to look for the needle in the haystack and what you come out with from having the machine sift through the haystack is a box of straw, where maybe the needle’s in there and maybe a few bonus needles, then that’s a whole lot better than having humans try to sift through a haystack.
Sounds like a pretty easy system for determined terrorists to game.
The main point of the Threat Level post, though, is that 1) this involved more than just telecom (and email) providers. It also included our banks and whatnot, and 2) since former participants in this sytem will always invoke executive privilege (and state secrets) the only way to figure out what happened would be to subpoena the CEOs of the companies to testify.
I spoke with Tice extensively in the spring of 2006. With Bush still in power, the whistleblower was considerably more taciturn than on television last week. But looking back through the transcript of my interviews now, in the context of his new revelations, it seems clear that Tice was saying that credit card companies and banks gave the same kind of cooperation to the government that phone companies did.
"To get at what’s really going on here, the CEOs of these telecom companies, and also of the banking and credit card companies, and any other company where you have big databases, those are the people you have to haul in to Congress and tell them you better tell the truth," he said at the time. "Because anyone in the government is going to claim executive privilege."
You might recall, incidentally, that both Arlen "Scottish Haggis" Specter and John Dingell tried to subpoena the telecom executives, with Dingell having more success than Specter. I’m fairly sure no one subpoenaed the email providers, and I don’t think anyone subpoenaed the credit card providers and banks and database companies with respect to the wiretapping program.
But we did note here, during the debates, that immunity was going to extend far beyond AT&T and Verizon, to those database companies and banks and email providers.
So what does that do to our ability to learn what happened? Can–and would–the Obama Administration give the contractors the clearance to speak about this program? Wasn’t that precisely what BushCO was trying to avoid by buying their silence with immunity? And remember, the IG review of the program currently going on does not touch the role of the providers–so Glenn Fine is specifically prohibited from telling us what those providers were doing.
Threat Level is absolutely correct in saying that the corporations hold the key to understanding how our government spied on us. But it’s not clear we’re likely to get that key anytime soon.
I would not take Tice’s example as exactly what they were looking for. In principle, someone gaming the system would have have some general idea of what filtering data would make sense for the NSA. And then, act contrary to their model of what the NSA is looking for.
By the same token, I hope that someone in authority at NSA has seen “The Battle of Algiers”. Patterns are not immutable.
Yeah, that’s the biggest point.
First of all, the universe of known terrorists is so small, the entire premise for their data mining is faulty–the patterns aren’t going to be meaningful with a population that small.
Add in the fact that the terrorists we’re really worried about are the ones who know enough to keep changing their habits.
I have been making these points since I was an identity theft victim. By requiring this kind of data gathering from institutions which carry this information on us (please include insurance companies as well), Bush opened the flood gates for identity theft. He required the total gathering of information before the institutions had any kind of security protocols in place to help them safely gather and transfer this info to the government. If you track the passage of the Patriot Act as well as the hospital scene in 2004, against the rate of increase in identity theft, the stat parallels are disturbing. Additionally, the stats on the rise of global terror also parallel because terrorists move around on stolen identification. So Bush has made our private lives less safe and the world less safe.
We need to add libraries to the list too.
Add to that grocery store and book store “club” cards.
klynn, that interests me. How do you find the stats on identity theft?
The ID theft rate was posted in a report on the AARP website a while back (3 years). I just did a quick search and do not see the report up anymore. I’ll keep looking.
When I became an identity theft victim and started researching, all research trails on what happened to me led to a breakdown in protections of my information as requested by the government to a service provider who had all my evidently, not-so-private-but-I-thought-it-was, information.
When my ID was traced to a terrorist hiding in India, I was not too happy and became a pain in legislators backsides.
No one would make eye contact with me as I asked the questions, “Why is the government requesting this information on me? And then it dawned on me, the government was requesting it on everybody, despite the fact the neither the government nor those who hold my information could process the amount of data in a secure fashion.
I was remembering reading some articles about Hayden’s multiple failures at NSA in crafting info systems. Here’s one that gives links to follow on his incompetence.
” Groundbreaker: Announced by Hayden in 2000, this $2 billion program to improve the NSA’s hardware and maintenance is still incomplete — although the cost is thought to now exceed $4 billion. Despite the massive price tag, an investigation discovered Hayden’s “key” program lacked a quality control mechanism, or a contract management program.
– Cryptologic Mission Management: A $300 million effort to develop software that could track major projects — like Trailblazer and Groundbreaker — is essentially kaput. As a result, the NSA still “has no mechanism to systematically assess whether it is spending money effectively and getting what it has paid for,” sources told Gorman.”
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpoi…..000592.php
Oy. Thanks for the background.
The only theft that’s ever happened to me (I think) was the old double-swipe trick with a credit card (twice, two different cards), and both times it was the credit-card people who caught it and called me. I think it was the charges to that casino in Rio that alerted them — the operator and I had a good laugh about that.
How were you first alerted?
A back-up back security service for our credit union called Memorial Day weekend about an hour after the bank closed on Saturday and asked if I was in India purchasing electronic parts. We were able to clarify that we were still in Ohio.
Our accounts were closed down for two weeks.
This happened about eight months after getting notified of a data breach at our health insurance company’s off-site IT security back-up contractor. Info on our entire family was breached along with thousands of others. So more ID theft could be in our future.
Does anyone claim to have ever caught a terrorist through these means?
No, but the Repubs have managed to neuter the Dem Leaders in Congress, so it wasn’t a total waste …
No but they are claiming that they let go one person who has then gone back to become a terrorist, or atleast really annoyed with america. Something is very wrong with this whole situation.
Am not certain the American public understands data mining, its possibilities and ubiquity.
Have always wondered if their government work is why SAS has not gone public. My guess has been they do not want the transparency that the accompanying regulatory filings might reveal.
A little seasoning before the grilling improves flavor dramatically.
Just sayin’.
Dang! Testimonials, even.
I was thinking the same. Use a rub on them or marinate them.
Thanks ew.
digg
O o. TPM:
Well, and why not. He’s not Senator. So he’s still got to ensure he wins the primary.
You said what I was thinking. Great grandstanding issue from the Specter and McCain school. Cuomo can roar like a lion and raise holy hell for effect – no results need come of it. He gains by virtue of his grandstanding on a compelling issue.
Though a popular ploy used by all politicians, I use McCain and Specter as favorite examples, because those two dorks are famous for grandstanding on an issue and turning around and voting quietly with the Republican status quo.
Somewhere yesterday I ran across the name “Acxium”, the biggest company that’s hiding in plain sight. Google the name. Strange results page. Nothing from the company itself, just mentions of it here and there. Apparently this company is where the gigantic private data heap is kept and winnowed.
The telecom companies merely let the NSA install “splitters” on their main fibers thereby allowing the NSA access to everything going over their network. I suspect the CEOs’ knowledge of what was going on stops there, i.e., what the NSA did with that information was NSA business only.
We are told, however, that the NSA piped a lot of this stuff to contractors in Israel for analysis. If you could subponea the CEOs of those firms, you might learn many interesting things.
Just makes you wonder why the organization Camera pressured Fox News to take down that four part report by Carl Cameron just after 9/11? Never hear Amdocs, Comverse Infosys/Verint mentioned when the telecom immunity issue comes up.
http://www.informationclearing…..e17260.htm
The experience of Carl Cameron, chief Washington correspondent at Fox News Channel and the first mainstream U.S. reporter to present the allegations of Israeli surveillance of the 9/11 hijackers, was perhaps more typical, both in its particulars and aftermath. The attack against Cameron and Fox News was spearheaded by a pro-Israel lobby group called the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), which operated in tandem with the two most highly visible powerhouse Israel lobbyists, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (itself currently embroiled in a spy scandal connected to the Defense Department and Israeli Embassy). “CAMERA pep- pered the shit out of us”, Carl Cameron told me in 2002, referring to an e-mail bombardment that eventually crashed the Fox News.com servers. Cameron himself received 700 pages of almost identical e-mail messages from hundreds of citizens (though he suspected these were spam identities). CAMERA spokesman Alex Safian later told me that Cameron’s upbringing in Iran, where his father traveled as an archeologist, had rendered the reporter “very sympathetic to the Arab side”. Safian added, “I think Cameron, personally, has a thing about Israel”–coded language implying that Cameron was an anti-Semite. Cameron was outraged at the accusation.
According to a source at Fox News Channel, the president of the ADL, Abraham Foxman, telephoned executives at Fox News’ parent, News Corp., to demand a sit-down in the wake of the Cameron reportage. The source said that Foxman told the News Corp. executives, “Look, you guys have generally been pretty fair to Israel. What are you doing putting this stuff out there? You’re killing us”. The Fox News source continued, “As good old boys will do over coffee in Manhattan, it was like, well, what can we do about this? Finally, Fox News said, ‘Stop the e-mailing. Stop slamming us. Stop being in our face, and we’ll stop being in your face–by way of taking our story down off the web. We will not retract it; we will not disavow it; we stand by it. But we will at least take it off the web.’” Following this meeting, within four days of the posting of Cameron’s series on Fox News.com, the transcripts disappeared, replaced by the message, “This story no longer exists”.
Thanks. Does anyone have a copy of those transcripts, e.g., the way-back machine, etc.?
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
http://www.newsfollowup.com/id…..esbold.pdf
Four part report by Carl Cameron (wiretapping and datamining)
http://www.informationclearing…..le7545.htm
Thanks, Leen.
You’d find they’re trying to analyze language in new ways to ‘connect the dots’ better than they have before. You would also probably discover this analysis is being done by many companies and governments for various reasons.
Our government isn’t the only one which abuses power when it can.
Probably the one thing you’d have the most trouble getting is real statistics on it’s success rate with regard to terrorism. If it’s failing they wouldn’t want you to cancel contracts. If it’s succeeding they wouldn’t want the ‘bad guys’ to know.
I wonder if Israeli companies which snoop on U.S. phone lines also have contracts to have access to European or Asian phone systems.
can obama rescind that executive priviledge for the sake of national security?
I would think the president can use his “insta de classify” power the previous adminstration was so kind to invent
IIRC, Executive Privilege would be a dead issue. The scoundrels in question were shielded by executive privilege under Bushco only. These actors are not protected by any such privilege under Obama, unless he gives it to them.
Somebody correct me if I’m wrong.
That will undoubtedly be litigated. But I suspect Obama WON’T reverse BUsh on this issue.
If he would have, he wouldn’t have voted for the FISA amendments last year.
It looks like another Tequila Sunrise. Ford’s Nixon Pardon, Iran Contra Pardons, Bush Family gutting of S&L’s with taxpayer funded bailout, GHWB Gulf War. If history is our guide, it looks like most of the Dubya Bushco players will not suffer any legal consequences.
each time they are exposed and ignored they rewrite their playbook, they make it more sophisticated and less more likely they will succeed with their depravity
the next time they rise to power, (and they WILL rise) they will do more damage then this time, and the next time they might not be exposed
for instance this time we had joe wilson, we had the real cia, we had the fbi and we had some watchdogs going public
the next time the watchdogs will be discovered before they expose the depravity, the cia will be entirely “team b”, the fbi will be among their ilk and they will go undetected, unexposed.
and America will be no more
Yes, you can surely see the writing on the wall. All Team B.
according to some reporting, executive priviledge claims are honored by succeeding presidents
So its a gray area – this executive privilege. Thanks.
If executive privilege applies at all, why would it expire on transition from one president to the next? Rove’s behaviour and conversations now wouldn’t be protected, but when he was an agent of President Dubya, it is at least conceivable that EP applied.
Remember Bushco fired many Arabic-speaking translators b/c they might have been gay. Data mining is much more useful for insider trading and blackmail than for its stated anti-terrorism purpose.
If you want to help obfusicate such programs for the government, by adding more false positives, you could always do what a number of us have done via email and usenet for years, adding signature blocks containing keywords the government would want to look for. Of course, good chance you could get on some government boogyman list.
I hate being a tin-hatter, but Bush didn’t need to buy the banks’ silence with immunity. He bought it with TARP.
Nothing tin foil about that at all. Pure logic and common sense.
OK. I misspelled it. It was in a comment by MadDog here yesterday. Here’s the link to the memo describing Acxiom’s function.
BREAKING STORY from your business reporter
I understand that Dick Cheney owns a controlling interest in a secret company called Terrorists R Us, whose primary product is the design, creation and execution of large terrifying scenarios for the purpose of 1) causing fear in the population, and 2) giving government a basis on which to a) invade, b) increase staffing, budget and secrecy for black ops, and c) neutralise people power. There are several other modifications of government (d, e, f etc,) under no.2, some less well defined or understood, which are not mentioned specifically here because of their fuzzy nature.
This company has been extremely successful in recent years, using a large budget whose source is kept under tight wraps, and hiring the best available talent for its operations worldwide. This success can be estimated from the company’s enormous profits, which never appear on its annual reports, which themselves never see the light of day. The most telling measure of success however is the almost universal acceptance of a constant terrorist threat, a threat created by the very company that offers costly means for counteracting it.
While the direct representatives of Terrorists R Us have lost some of their high positions in government, the company remains successful, largely due to its earlier (and ongoing) campaign of convincing humankind that it is truly and always under threat of death and destruction. A private (off-the-record) meeting with one of the company’s principals revealed an interesting detail; that while money and power are important incentives, the executives, staff and field personnel are primarily motivated by blood lust. A project is deemed dull and pedestrian unless it includes killing and maiming. The principal explained that this blood lust is one of the top qualifications considered in hiring, and that since this particular trait is so well suppressed among the population at large, company operations are performed with little fear of exposure. This interviewer offered congratulations on such a successful venture, and commented that the company name now makes perfect sense.
Do you think Acxiom would mind if I quoted them?
This from their page on having them make up lists of prospects for you:
http://www.acxiom.com/11668/InfoBase-X_List
Ya think they might have a lot of info on just about every household in the U.S., and that they aren’t talking about using anonymizing ID numbers?
I’m sure that Acxiom wouldn’t mind another quote. *crosses fingers* Here’s their CEO, speaking of grilling executives. See anything interesting?
http://www.acxiom.com/company-leadership
BTW, Acxiom claims to be based in Arkansas, and their logo has a long stem on the lower left leg of the ‘x’, giving the logo a comfortingly Christian feel, for those who like to find psychology in graphics.
Incidentally Wes Clark was doing work for Axciom before he first ran for Pres.
That’s interesting. I’ve had a favorable view of Clark, and have been puzzled about why he’s been shunned by the Obama team.
How long did Clark work for Axciom? What did they hire hm to do? Did he know what they were doing, or did he quit when he found out?
Bob in HI
Me too. Every time I have heard Clark write or say anything about the situation with Iran, Iraq or the I/P conflict I feel like I am listening to a man of reason and with a deep level of military experience and wisdom.
Unwilling to use our military for unnecessary wars based on a “pack of lies”
I used to work at Lucent, up in Murray Hill NJ (old Bell Labs) Those guys have a rotten rep of dealing only with big customers who buy billion dollar equipment while letting good stuff rot that was developed in house.
Also, they did a ton of top secret stuff. Always wondered what a telecom was building that was top secret. hmmmmm
A criminal misuse of a national treasure. It is a breath of sanity to encounter the traces of Bell Labs even today. I remember working on a problem for weeks and having a friend go down to Bell Labs and describe it to a roomful of people there: they had solved the problem, added to the solution, and had half an article written in less than 15 minutes. One in fact did co-author.
17 – some of the techies (and I wouldn’t begin to know on this) indicated that in addition to the splitters, the telecom’s proprietary software was likely more sophisticated and better suited/utilized for some of what NSA wanted done and so there may well have been more direct involvement. I couldn’t begin to comment on the issue bc I don’t understand the tech, but it’s something that’s been raised on telecom participation before.
One of the other items that I still feel pretty strongly is both out there, and is not being addressed on any front, is how all of this massive data mining and massive, warrantless access, is going to work and is supposed to work with the laws of the other countries in which telecoms are doing business.
On the SWIFT part of the bank access issue, we not only had the banks held to be operating illegally under EU law and taken to task there, but a result that included relocating processing offices to make it more difficult in the future for the US to get access to some info. Here we had all the state privacy laws that telecoms were violating (going in part to LD’s issue of what are the privacy expectations of Americans or legal, US based persons),but we also have lots of other countries where telecoms that are ‘doing business’ there are subject to their privacy laws. I would bet that the FISA process might pass muster, as being a court supervised activity, but I have to wonder about years and years of an AG’s covert, politicized slap and tickle through all European communications goes down? The US isn’t the only country with laws and jails.
Mr. Tice has described an elegant virtual dog’s nose, and it’s way cool. If we can get our heads around the nefarious offenses we can hope for more than Tang and Teflon from the program. Anyone know if NSA gets NASA’s mail and vice-versa?
Speaking of stete’s secrets, national security, privilege, etc. – and other countries —
http://www.guardian.co.uk/poli…..aq-minutes
Gov there has 28 days to appeal and surely will, plus there are other issues of vetoes and publications, but the point, again, is that we are not the only country with laws.
Sure you aren’t thinking of Acxiom? They seem to be in that business and do have a web presence.
See my comments at 30 and 34. Yeah, I misspelled it. Very interesting company, and it seems to me that their CEO would be worth talking to.
Bmaz has pointed out over and over again that the Telecom companies are all ready protected. When the appropriate Reps do not seem to have a clue as to the depth and breadth of these wiretapping and datamining programs that is what concerns me.
Ot
have you seen these maps of the economic hardship across the nation? Steve Clemons over at Washington Note
http://www.csmonitor.com/patchworknation/
http://www.csmonitor.com/patch…..for-obama/
45 – privilege exists only by assertion of the party privileged.
So, for example, a lawyer can’t prevent a client from talking about conversations with the lawyer by claiming atty-client privilege, bc the privilege extends to the client and the client does not HAVE to assert it if they do not want to. [Like a self incrimination privilege that can be waived by giving a voluntary confession]
Rove does not have the deliberative privilege to assert it, and the question would be who does have it and is that party going to properly assert it. There has been a history of comity between old and new presidents whereby new presidents have allowed old presidents to keep a lot of their secrets, secret. Obama’s EO on docs seems to indicate he absolutely believes that the power of the privilege is in the current occupant of the office. Along those lines, I would think he would at least require Rove to explain to the current occupant’s satisfaction why the information should be subject to privilege for protection of the office, not the former office holder.
We’ll see though.
“There has been a history of comity between old and new presidents whereby new presidents have allowed old presidents to keep a lot of their secrets, secret”
Even when they so obviously undermine the Dept of Justice, commit War crimes, etc etc. One would think allowing a President to keep their secrets would be based on the severity and effects of the alleged crimes.
This is bang on.
Years back I was on a team contracted to defend a government interest in a fairly high profile defamation lawsuit filed by the head of a domestic government. During the course of the pre-trial discovery process, we sought to depose the plaintiff on discussions in a meeting the main defendant had characterized in a way the plaintiff claimed slandered him. The main defendant didn’t attend the meeting [that would be obvious from the name], but did claim “reliable sources” [somewhat typically, it was never clear whether any of those were actually present at the meeting]. The plaintiff balked – a surprise, given there’d been no suggestion of the meeting being a bone of contention – – protested, proceeded to bluster – no surprise from a politician – huffed, then stomped out trailing his entourage, returning after some delay with the objection that all the discussions, even the subject-matter, of the meeting in question was actually conducted under the Dome of Silence – IOW executive privilege.
Which, I’m sure you’ll appreciate, poses something of a conundrum to those defending against a defamation lawsuit which claims the defendant’s description of the purpose of and the discussions in SAID MEETING as THE slander. Nor do I think it comes as a shock to learn that, not just the main defendant but all the defendants determined to halt the progress of the lawsuit to trial until that privilege claim had been decided upon [though, actually accomplishing that interim goal is neither as obvious nor easy as might seem].
Over the course of some [admittedly, and of course regrettably unavoidable, considerable] period of time, it was decided by someone other than those involved the proper person to determine the solution to the conundrum was the trial judge; and so everyone returned to pre-trial depositions. However, in the intervening [admittedly – see above] passage of time the plaintiff had ceased being the head of the government – which, when he was confronted [as if anew!] with questions directed to determine the content of discussions therein, came up – as did the plaintiff’s realization that the former assertion of privilege was no longer ‘his’, but that of his successor. I can’t say why, but for whatever reason[s] the lawsuit took a new turn and was resolved without trial, out of court, and, in keeping with the status of the parties at that time, as they say: “privately”.
There’s the ticket! Would love to hear that explanation.
Ms EW –
I’m reading your post focusing on the two big points you highlight – each touching on a subject that engages phenomenon so big it’s difficult to get a handle on it.
I agree it’s worthwhile pointing to both, but for a very different set of reasons in each case. So please forgive me taking a stab at each separately.
You’re point about the approach being described by Tice as seeming easy to game is quite frankly unassailable. But I wonder if part of that might have to do with Tice’s position on the intelligence production assembly line, and when he occupied it.
Tice, for all the advantages he has over those uninvolved in any way in that assembly line, except as spewers of the raw material – meaning us, along with most of the human race – repeatedly points to his limited point of view and that the concerns that led him to whistleblower status or something like it.
[I don’t know if it’s more accurate to say his status was the inevitable result of altruism, or that to some extent he was driven to it by the bureaucratic pushback to his internal questioning. OTOH I am struck by Tice’s apparently consistent care in distinguishing between what he knows from being personally involved – or at least that part of it he believes he can discuss without being charged – and what he surmises as probable, or possible – – even taking care to distinguish between the latter two. Indeed, it seems clear that for example it’s Olbermann who is letting Tice’s surmises on possibility out for a run, not Tice on his own.]
That said, as I see it you take from Tice’s ‘testimony’ on this issue that:
[A] someone who spent some time at various spots along the intell production assembly line received and retained the impression that the things HE at least was asked to do, were [not are – he’s been out that job for several years now and does not even pretend to know what’s going on now] incapable of contributing to a product of any value to the ‘good’ purpose
[this isn’t your point here but it’s certainly Olbermann’s: while at the same time Tice is expressing concern they were, and are, entirely capable of contributing to other products which don’t appear to hold any value to the ‘good’ purpose and moreover are readily subverted to ‘bad’ purposes]
and
[b] based solely on some things Tice knows about and feels free to discuss publicly, the assembly line he worked on seems to have a lot in common with another useless, retrogressive and destructive “analytical” approach we know of, being “profiling”, of which the most infamous subset is RACIAL PROFILING [RP].
As to the latter first:
One of the many, many problems with RP is that it yields a certain amount of product which one is largely unable to prove distinguishable from what would have come from randomness. An aspect of your point is even more acute: that this approach would tend to pick up ‘the usual suspects’ if you will, when ‘the suspects’ we’re truly concerned about are actually UN-usual. One could envision this system picking up a Muslim-American with family in Palestine far more readily than any of the 19 involved in the 9/11 hijackings – which, not at all incidentally, seems to capture the bulk of the ’successes’ Bushies claim in keeping us “safe” since.
But I want to focus even more acutely, and to do so I’m choose one of the filters Tice describes: that most voice calls by terrorists are under two minutes in length. How would such a filter be derived? I can think of two important contributing factors:
[1] the Jack Bauer notion of some sort of coded ‘GO’ signal, like ‘The camel has landed on the eagle’s back’ or some such nonsense; IOW the product of little boy anti-terrorist bullshit wet dreams; and
[2] the typical length of calls relaying the most basic utilitarian information, such as to tell someone who is expecting a wire transfer of funds that the funds have been relayed, or the name and address of someone to who you can stay with for a while – IOW Tice’s “pizza call”.
But even granting the arguable value in getting something from [2], I take part of your point to be that the whole system would be geared toward preventing another 9/11 – and not even just in general contours, but another exact duplicate! But that’s categorically not at all in keeping with any ‘pattern’ al Qaeda had ‘developed. Rather, part of aQ’s ’success’ was in coming up with plots that fit NO previous pattern – as I think you argue, the product of conscious deliberation to avoid detection and interruption.
Now, it would seem to me that, not just Tice, but a lot of intell production assembly line workers, like their counterparts on an auto assembly line in ye olde Detroit, would have very little trouble realizing the limited-to-none-to-possibly-negative utility in their function in producing a ‘good’ product, and quite a bit of time and incentive to talk about all this, in work breaks and after work and at home and in social gatherings – and even or perhaps especially during work.
And one thing would particularly fuel such talk is the shipping of government intell ‘waste’ to private contractors – ostensibly [possibly] to ‘warehouse’, but just as easily, so far as the government production assembly line workers can tell, to further process.
[Leaving aside all other implications, you and many here are very well aware of the number and variety of private concerns that use such ‘waste’ for commercial and electoral purposes, and who at least in theory might be willing to ‘pay a price’ for ‘government garbage’ to those ends.]
Meanwhile, at the supervisory and managerial level, this problem would be evident as well, but give rise to quite a different set of concerns: the need to maintain the program, something that typically comes down to budgets and funding, would require the showing of some ‘product’ that’s marketable to the top levels of the executive branch, and of course Congress, beyond simply ‘Well, we’re watching, and the good news is we’re not getting anything.’
And it’s that perceived need that would lead to a greater focus on ‘by-products’ and ‘unintended gifts’ – like at one level your Jose Padillas – to please Congress – and at another your James Risens – to please the executive branch.
Do I have it right?
I’ve worked in telco and data operations for most of my working life, and I’ve run into “data mining” quite a bit–it holds a special fascination for the executive-suite set, even without the chance to do the White House/GOP a favor.
The most important thing to remember is that the biggest reason for all the secrecy is most likely that the whole effort is at best a waste of time and at worst a conscious fraud. Data mining as it is usually defined–searching huge masses of data for something interesting that you DON’T know–is almost always a fool’s errand. To get actionable information, you [a] have to know what you are looking for and [b] have to design/organize your database for right kind of targeted search. Otherwise, you are trying to match a whole lot of random information to a few very general patterns. The false hits overwhelm the true hits. The signal fades away into the noise, and no amount of filtering can recover anything usable.
Compounding the problem is the quality of the people that press ahead anyway, despite the above problem. Crack programmers and PhD information-scientists know the above won’t work and say so. They are “not team players.” But the CEOs are and they find underlings who are too. You end up with a bunch of C-average, legacy-admission, business majors running an effort that is intellectually too complicated for the best-trained intellects.
These two factors–high false hit rates and low-grade talent–are precisely why these government and private dragnet efforts are so dangerous. It isn’t what they will find (which will be squat), but what they BELIEVE they have found that will get us. Consider the antiterrorist watch list. Why else is having one of the most common names in the country enough to get me on it? And why did a case-management firm that I’d never heard of remind me that it had approved me for a proctologist exam two states away? And when notified of the mistake, why did the latter violate HIPPA by giving me the Social Security number, address, phone number, and mother’s maiden name of a complete stranger in the hopes that I’d agree we were one in the same? They got access to more records than they should have had, which confused them. They did not know what they were doing and blended records that had to be kept separate. Then they assumed that the mistake did not matter and compunded it in a bureaucratic effort to make it go away. Welcome to the future.
Throw in the huge amounts of cash that a contractor can make under a data-mining contract and things can only get worse. Another post contained a lot of speculation about why the contractor destroyed the Army’s Counter Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA) domestic spying database on the eave of an audit (the contractor was one of the one’s that bribed Randy Cunningham). While it is possible that the database was destroyed for fear of revealing all the spying that was done, I think it at least as likely that it was destroyed because it didn’t contain anything. Perhaps the contractor took the money and just answered government queries with whatever they thought the requestor wanted.
The bottom line is that the truth/knowledge is probably relatively harmless, as the Founders believed. But falsehoods built on fake information technology that is kept secret is likely to be very dangerous indeed. I worry less about Orwell’s 1984 than I do about Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”.
Can I just say thank you, robspierre? What you’ve written has the ring of real truth to my info-professional ears. Every so often some mental mediocrity — usually charismatic — comes along claiming to have a new and different approach to some intractable technical problem or other, and convinces somebody to spend gobs of money on it, and after much time and beating of heads upon walls, the vacuum within becomes apparent to all and sundry and the project implodes (and the bright shiny mediocrity moves on to afflict some other project). It makes perfect sense that there could be an absolutely colossal technical failure at the heart of these TIA programs. And it makes perfect sense that bad people with bad agendas could ride on these programs in order to achieve their bad ends — and those bad people would have every motive in the world to build walls of secrecy around the programs to keep anyone on the outside from ever learning about the colossal failures those walls hide — because if people knew about the failures within, the programs would be killed, and then the bad people would have no programs to ride on any more.
Wheat meet Chaff.
I tend to believe that these programs remain unsuccessful in their stated attempts to find the terrorists. I also believe that these programs incidentally provide enormous opportunities for less noble efforts to gather useful information.
Even if the folks with good intentions are failing, there are and will continue to be less scrupulous folks with access that can use their own search criteria to get info streaming into their agendas unhindered. Whether it is opponent research or ratfucking or simple profit motives, the data exists to be queried. Americans, Chinese, Israelis, Russians and even the French have significant organized crime syndicates that are licking their chops to get at some of this good stuff. Some or all of them will eventually get to it.
I guarantee it. It is too big and too valuable a target. So if secretive government use is not enough to rile your concern, wait until the underworld gets a hold of every communication they desire. It will make the nuisance of occasional identity theft seem like the good old days.