Promoted by Steven D.
The Baltimore Sun reported today that Bush rejected President Clinton’s effective, legal surveillance program that did not invade privacy to adopt the current NSA spying program, which is ineffective, illegal and invasive of citizens’ privacy rights. So, the question jumping off the page may be: Why would Bush use a program that does not actually assist the finding of terrorists, yet also has the disadvantage of invading Americans’ privacy rights?
The Clinton surveillance program, called ThinThread, was created during the late 1990s to “gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws.” Several bloggers provide excellent posts on the components and nature of the program.
The key to evaluating Bush’s true motive for his NSA program is that testing of ThinThread showed it was far better in finding potential threats and protecting privacy than the current NSA program that Bush chose in its stead. “For example, its ability to sort through massive amounts of data to find threat-related communications far surpassed the existing system, sources said. It also was able to rapidly separate and encrypt U.S.-related communications to ensure privacy.” But, Gen. Hayden of NSA decided not to use these two tools or the monitoring feature to prevent abuse of the records. The problem is that not using the ThinThread program has “undermined the agency’s ability to zero in on potential threats.” Moreover, “ThinThread could have provided a simple solution to privacy concerns.”
Incredibly, the ThinThread program was far superior to the NSA program in place in 2004:
“A number of independent studies, including a classified 2004 report from the Pentagon’s inspector-general, in addition to the successful pilot tests, found that the program provided `superior processing, filtering and protection of U.S. citizens, and discovery of important and previously unknown targets,’ said an intelligence official familiar with the program who described the reports to The Sun. The Pentagon report concluded that ThinThread’s ability to sort through data in 2001 was far superior to that of another NSA system in place in 2004, and that the program should be launched and enhanced.”
The upshot is that the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program is ineffective at finding terrorists:
“Without ThinThread’s data-sifting assets, the warrantless surveillance program was left with a sub-par tool for sniffing out information, and that has diminished the quality of its analysis, according to intelligence officials. Sources say the NSA’s existing system for data-sorting has produced a database clogged with corrupted and useless information. The mass collection of relatively unsorted data, combined with system flaws that sources say erroneously flag people as suspect, has produced numerous false leads, draining analyst resources, according to two intelligence officials. FBI agents have complained in published reports in The New York Times that NSA leads have resulted in numerous dead ends.”
And, Bush did not adopt ThinThread’s privacy protections even though the “encryption feature would have been simple to implement” in minutes. One explanation may be that “encryption would have required analysts to be more disciplined in their investigations, however, by forcing them to gather what a court would consider sufficient information to indicate possible terrorist activity before decryption could be authorized.” So, using ThinThread would have required compliance with legal search standards, something that the Decider says is just not technically feasible with his program. Sounds like a convenient method for chipping away at constitutional safeguards.
While Bush proclaims that his NSA program is for the purpose of finding terrorists, this article says it is not effective for that purpose. On the other hand, the former head of NSA operations division told the 9/11 Commission that “ThinThread could have identified the hijackers had it been in place before the attacks.” Is that why Bush team often states that NSA surveillance would have permitted the identification and capture of the 9/11 hijackers had it been in place prior to 9/11? That is, the general statements made by Bush are true for ThinThread, which is a NSA surveillance program, just not the program that Bush is using. So, in accordance with Bush’s parsing practice, his statements would be technically true, just misleadingly false.
Finally, the article points out that ThinThread was rejected partially because it too aggressive and could violate civil rights. After 9/11, NSA lawyers reversed position by adopting Bush’s theory of his war powers. However, one intelligence official stated that ThinThread is legal regardless of whether the US is at war. So, did Bush reject ThinThread partially because he could not then use the terror card as a pretext to expand presidential powers?
Given that a perfectly legal program which could actually accomplish the stated objective of capturing terrorists before attacking Americans exists, but was rejected by Bush, would could be the real underlying purpose for Bush’s NSA surveillance program that has a minor, if any, impact on anti-terror objectives?
Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that if Bush is to actually succeed in finding terrorists with the program he is using, this program requires more data about Americans. That is, phone records are not sufficient for this objective, so more data would be required. Like the camel who first sticks its head in the tent, Bush may have wanted pretextual grounds to keep expanding the nature and amount of information about Americans that he collected and deposited in databases.
As noted by one expert, the NSA program Bush is using is apparently not effective at finding terrorists, not unless more data is obtained by the government in addition to phone records. Public reports indicate the NSA is using social network analysis to find terrorists, which is not effective without more data. If the NSA wants to use mathematics to root out terrorists, it would have to use a different type of profiling technique called formal concept analysis, which requires more than phone records: “For instance, you might group together people based on what cafes, bookstores and mosques they visit, and then find out that all the people who go to a certain cafe also attend the same mosque (but maybe not vice versa).”
Additional information indicates Bush wanted more than phone records. Statements by telecom company officials indicate that Bush wanted long-distance carriers, not local telecoms, which expands the nature and amount of information the NSA can obtain. Technical experts say long-distance calling records may provide information not only on long-distance customers but also “traffic that the carriers connect on behalf of others, including some calls placed on cellphones or on Internet voice connections.”
Finally, the equipment that AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein says was installed by NSA in AT&T’s secret switching room is apparently Narus, which has the capacity to be the “best internet spy tool:”
“Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record,” says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. “We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls.”
* * *
The combination can keep track of, analyze and record nearly every form of internet communication, whether e-mail, instant message, video streams or VOIP phone calls that cross the network.”
So, what is the real purpose of Bush’s NSA spying program? Is terrorism being used as a cover to collect reams of information about Americans to establish a central database? Could there be political motives?
“Given this history, is it such a stretch to think the White House might find this information useful in helping Republican candidates hold on to national power in 2008? You really think it would never occur to Bush or Karl Rove that private knowledge of which Democratic supporters were contributing to which candidates, or which campaign advisers were leaking to which reporters, would be an advantage in a tough campaign? Or that a little listen-in to their conversations might produce a few votes? We don’t know that this thought ever crossed their minds, but there’s so much we don’t know about what they are thinking. So we just have to trust the integrity of the administration’s public statements. Oh, goodie. Do you feel safer now?”
Given that Bush rejected the ThinThread program that is reported to be both effective at finding terrorists and provide protection to privacy rights, one just has to wonder at the real reason for the NSA program.
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