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December 24, 2005
Spying or Pattern Recognition
NSA spy program broader than Bush admitted
Government and industry officials with knowledge of the program told the newspaper the NSA sought to analyze communications patterns to gather clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, as well as the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages.
Calls to and from Afghanistan were of particular interest to the NSA, the Times said. This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States would often otherwise require a warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.
Notice the last part of that phrase: it would "require a warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom."
So, basically, this is a large data mining operation. Rather than individual, random searches (almost useless), or general racial profiling (statistically better, but still not necessarily effective), they use broad sampling to look for anomalies - and none of it's court-admissable.
The more I read about this, the less of a problem I have with it. Does it still concern me? Some. It's hard to get enough detail (imagine that from a top-secret program) to really get a handle on it.
If this is an accurate portrayal of what's been happening, they are not spying on an individual, they are trying to pick up on clues and patterns that might otherwise be seen as background noise. Think of the ultraviolet astronomical pictures as example of this in the scientific world.
More and more this seems like good intelligence work.
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