The Nature of Wiretapping

More from Cringely about the sort of wiretapping the NSA might be doing:

"...This last thought comes from an old friend of mine who is conservative in the very best sense and knows what he is writing about:

"Traffic analysis, at the NSA? I'm tempted to be sarcastic, but I won't be. As you might know, I started a company a few years ago with a former NSA guy -- somebody who was a cryptographer and Russian linguist on those submarines that snuck into Soviet harbors to tap their phone lines -- and we applied traffic analysis to Internet discussion groups to identify opinion leaders, conversation trends and so forth. We used a lot of techniques that were developed or applied to law enforcement. And we didn't use anything that violated anybody's security clearances... really!

"(My company) was acquired by a business intelligence company funded by the CIA venture capital outfit. Apparently the stuff I invented is now in the hands of a couple of intelligence agencies, including Homeland Security.

"I'll tell you what I think the most troubling thing about all this is. It's easy to see whatever pattern you're looking for. It's like curve fitting in the stock market -- looks beautiful historically and maybe even in the short run, but it's a disaster in the making. So we have these guys running the country who saw a non-existent pattern in Iraq that justified a war ... and now we're going to give them software that will make it easy to create the illusion of patterns of conspiracy.

"Your friend from the NSA was right, but it's worse than he suggests. It's not just that social network analysis casts a wide net. It's that without oversight by people who really grasp the mathematics and have some distance from the whole thing, they're going to see patterns where there aren't any.

"They have a history of that."

Pattern recognition, and false positives. I won't even try to give examples, since my imagination is very lacking in it's own right. This History Channel special does a much better job. This talk does remind me of the movie Pi, regardless, prosecution under this program is likely to land the culprit in a prison without protection from due process laws. I could be wrong there. For civil disobedience, I like this quote. It's something even the most hand fisted supporter of the law can't disagree with.

"When the government fears the people, you have liberty. When the people fear the government, you have tyranny." - Thomas Jefferson

Going back to the article, the same CIA VC firm has funded Facebook as well I believe, which is just as scary. It's easy to blur the difference between Data mining and Traffic analysis based Wiretapping here (like I'm about to do), since both are an infringement on privacy on some level, but more importantly companies have been collecting data and doing data mining for years now. Privacy will always be under attck since new data mining methods will be discovered. AOL's browser notes Every-single click, every single buddy-icon change and runs statistics on what is popular and what isn't. If you're an AOL or Google customer though, there's a contract. Last but not least, C-SPAN video of the House Democrats' hearing and the Attorney General's speech (The diverse law professor opinions are after the civil disobedience). As the Attorney General said in today's hearings, "...in time of war..."