PRISM Isn’t Data Mining and Other Falsehoods in the N.S.A. “Scandal”

[thucythucy]

44. My understanding, from reading this article and others,

is that PRISM is a program specifically designed to target suspicious foreign nationals. It is a separate department of the NSA, something like the rape investigation unit of a local police force is separate from the burglary or auto theft units.

As for what the NSA is doing with the metadata, the story is they are running it through a computer program that is supposed to flag potentially troubling relationships or correlations. For instance, when a particular phone number in Boston receives and makes long and multiple calls to a phone number in Chechnya connected to radical elements hostile to the United States, or implicated in prior terrorist activities. If and when such a correlation is made, the NSA then requests another warrent to actually tap those lines, or otherwise target the suspected party or parties, for closer scrutiny.

This, at any rate, is what I've been able to glean from OPs here and articles I've read elsewhere.

Of course, what makes all of this so unsettling is the secrecy. On the one hand, if you're trying to roll up a terrorist cell in the US--say, one that's determined to fly airliners into buildings--you don't want to tip off the suspects that you're on to them. On the other hand, all this secrecy makes all these programs ripe for serious and repeated abuses.

The question, again, is how do we find a balance?

And I for one have no idea at the moment how we might be able to do that.