Last edited Mon Jun 17, 2013, 12:10 PM - Edit history (4)
Everything else is made part of the profile. You're still stuck on that one aspect of the universal profiling step in the PRISM system.
The system doesn't protect anonymity - it profiles EVERYONE. You don't have to believe me, read William Binney, who was the NSA's lead Program Manager developing the ThinThread surveillance program before he resigned and became a whistle blower. Binney gave a lecture at MIT in which he explained how the Terrrorist Detection Program works by profiling every caller. Here's part of it: http://civic.mit.edu/blog/schock/the-government-is-profiling-you-william-binney-former-nsa
Relationship Mapping
He describes the key points of the slide: “Validating the data is crucial. Then you move to event recognition, check against your graph to see if you want that data or not. You also need privacy protection: determine whether to encrypt. Then you build an activity graph, and take other graphs from other domains: banking, phones, travel, twitter, whatever else you can gather. With a consolidated graph across all those domains, you analyze.“
One goal they had in the 1990s was to detect social security fraud. Their attempt was subject to an investigation. Binney thinks the data process they were using to do this wasn't unconstitutional.
In target development and discovery, you needed to figure out the network of possibles (suspects), separate from 'knowns,' and eliminate the vast bulk of traffic. This is what big data initiatives are looking for: automating target development.
He shows another slide: timeline analysis, email and phone. The slide shows communications activity over time across multiple platforms (email, phone, etc). Binney feels this also needs to be automated: what transaction combinations in this group need to trigger a warning?
For example: if you're trying to smuggle drugs from Colombia into the USA, the buyer and seller have to communicate to plan the transaction. “We have to find these communications and assess them.” Everyone in the USA is profiled. The info is gathered, and all they have to do is point to the target.
Someone from the audience asks “are those real phone numbers on the screen? Those are US phone numbers”
The image is of analysis of 9/11, Binney says. This is the danger. If you become a target, like Petraeus, now you're in the DB. The problem is, the FBI has access to this data. Mueller testified to that in March 2011 to the Senate judiciary committee.
In response to the Q: how would you prevent a future terrorist attack? Mueller said: we have a DB where one query can get all past emails and future emails as they come in. Then he says that “This is what (the new NSA server farm at) Bluffdale (Utah) is all about: storage for all that data.”
= new reply since forum marked as read