[Vision2020] U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program

Fri Jun 7 10:01:56 PDT 2013

What’s the Matter with Metadata?
Posted by Jane Mayer<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/bios/jane_mayer/search?contributorName=Jane%20Mayer>

  Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from liberal Northern California and the
chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, assured the public
earlier today that the government’s secret snooping into the phone records
of Americans was perfectly fine, because the information it obtained was
only “meta,” meaning it excluded the actual content of the phone
conversations, providing merely records, from a Verizon subsidiary, of who
called whom when and from where. In addition, she said in a prepared
statement, the “names of subscribers” were not included automatically in
the metadata (though the numbers, surely, could be used to identify them).
“Our courts have consistently recognized that there is no reasonable
expectation of privacy in this type of metadata information and thus no
search warrant is required to obtain it,” she said, adding that “any
subsequent effort to obtain the content of an American’s communications
would require a specific order from the FISA court.”

She said she understands privacy—“that’s why this is carefully done”—and
noted that eleven special federal judges, the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, which meets in secret, had authorized the vast
intelligence collection. A White House official made the same points to
reporters, saying, “The order reprinted overnight does not allow the
government to listen in on anyone’s telephone calls” and was subject to “a
robust legal regime.” The gist of the defense was that, in contrast to what
took place under the Bush Administration, this form of secret domestic
surveillance was legitimate because Congress had authorized it, and the
judicial branch had ratified it, and the actual words spoken by one
American to another were still private. So how bad could it be?

The answer, according to the mathematician and former Sun Microsystems
engineer Susan Landau, whom I interviewed while reporting on the plight of the
former N.S.A. whistleblower Thomas
Drake<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer>and
who is also the author of “Surveillance or Security?,” is that it’s
worse than many might think.

“The public doesn’t understand,” she told me, speaking about so-called
metadata. “It’s much more intrusive than content.” She explained that the
government can learn immense amounts of proprietary information by studying
“who you call, and who they call. If you can track that, you know exactly
what is happening—you don’t need the content.”

For example, she said, in the world of business, a pattern of phone calls
from key executives can reveal impending corporate takeovers. Personal
phone calls can also reveal sensitive medical information: “You can see a
call to a gynecologist, and then a call to an oncologist, and then a call
to close family members.” And information from cell-phone towers can reveal
the caller’s location. Metadata, she pointed out, can be so revelatory
about whom reporters talk to in order to get sensitive stories that it can
make more traditional tools in leak investigations, like search warrants
and subpoenas, look quaint. “You can see the sources,” she said. When the
F.B.I. obtains such records from news agencies, the Attorney General is
required to sign off on each invasion of privacy. When the N.S.A. sweeps up
millions of records a minute, it’s unclear if any such brakes are applied.

Metadata, Landau noted, can also reveal sensitive political information,
showing, for instance, if opposition leaders are meeting, who is involved,
where they gather, and for how long. Such data can reveal, too, who is
romantically involved with whom, by tracking the locations of cell phones
at night.

For the law-enforcement community, particularly the parts focussed on
locating terrorists, metadata has led to breakthroughs. Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/13/100913fa_fact_mcdermott>,
the master planner of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and
Washington, “got picked up by his cell phone,” Landau said. Many other
criminal suspects have given themselves away through their metadata trails.
In fact, Landau told me, metadata and other new surveillance tools have
helped cut the average amount of time it takes the U.S. Marshals to capture
a fugitive from forty-two days to two.

But with each technological breakthrough comes a break-in to realms
previously thought private. “It’s really valuable for law enforcement, but
we have to update the wiretap laws,” Landau said.

It was exactly these concerns that motivated the mathematician William
Binney, a former N.S.A. official who spoke to me for the Drake story, to
retire rather than keep working for an agency he suspected had begun to
violate Americans’ fundamental privacy rights. After 9/11, Binney told me,
as I reported in the piece, General Michael Hayden, who was then director
of the N.S.A., “reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets,
and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.”

Binney, who considered himself a conservative, feared that the N.S.A.’s
data-mining program was so extensive that it could help “create an
Orwellian state.”

As he told me at the time, wiretap surveillance requires trained human
operators, but data mining is an automated process, which means that the
entire country can be watched. Conceivably, the government could “monitor
the Tea Party, or reporters, whatever group or organization you want to
target,” he said. “It’s exactly what the Founding Fathers never wanted.”

On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 12:57 PM, Scott Dredge <scooterd408 at hotmail.com>wrote:

> Neither particularly scare me.  And if those working in security
> departments for US government gather data on me in a way that violates the
> 4th amendment such that this info can't be used against me in a court of
> law, then I'm already protected.  What should I be worrying about that I'm
> currently not concerned about?  Public humiliation if this info is released
> to the masses?
>
> ------------------------------
> Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2013 08:42:53 -0700
> From: godshatter at yahoo.com
> To: thansen at moscow.com
> CC: vision2020 at moscow.com
>
> Subject: Re: [Vision2020] U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S.
> Internet companies in broad secret program
>
> Yes, events like that happen (rarely).  Does that scare the piss out of
> you so much that you think it's OK to watch everyone all the time?
>
> Paul
>
>   ------------------------------
>  *From:* Tom Hansen <thansen at moscow.com>
> *To:* Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com>
> *Cc:* Joe Campbell <philosopher.joe at gmail.com>; KRFP <
> krfp at radiofreemoscow.org>; viz <vision2020 at moscow.com>
> *Sent:* Friday, June 7, 2013 8:32 AM
> *Subject:* Re: [Vision2020] U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S.
> Internet companies in broad secret program
>
> Paul Rumelhart declared:
>
> "I'm personally about as scared of dying today in a terrorist attack as I
> am of seeing Tom Hansen and Doug Wilson throw down their gauntlets and
> become best buds."
>
> I'll second that!  It's not like I will ever run in the Boston Marathon.
>
> Seeya at the Wingding, Moscow, because . . .
>
> "Moscow Cares" (the most fun you can have with your pants on)
> http://www.MoscowCares.com <http://www.moscowcares.com/>
>
> Tom Hansen
> Moscow, Idaho
>
> "There's room at the top they are telling you still
> But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
> If you want to be like the folks on the hill."
>
> - John Lennon
>
>
>
> On Jun 7, 2013, at 8:17 AM, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I'm personally about as scared of dying today in a terrorist attack as I
> am of seeing Tom Hansen and Doug Wilson throw down their gauntlets and
> become best buds.
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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