The Part Is The Whole

I've been trying to get my head around this whole NSA data mining operation. I think it's important not only to figure out what the government is doing but why. Why is this helpful to any effort on capturing terrorists? We have to understand the structures at work here.

Basically the government acquired a database of every phone call made on major telecommunications networks over the last several years (yes, that should kind of shock you). That data in and of itself isn't going to get you very far, seemingly. That I called my mother twice last week and four times the week before doesn't seem useful. Where that information goes is into a database that Gavin at Sadly No rightly calls "Enemyster." Bascially it's a large social-networking database that records through phone calls (and emails, text messages, web pages, IMs, etc.) links to terrorist suspects. If my mother talked to someone who talked to someone who talked to someone who talked to Mullah Omar, then I have a certain degree of separation to a suspect, and the more links I have, the more suspect I become.

To me this seems to create connections where none exist, considering everybody in the world is linked together in some way or other, and I could go on a massive wrong number-dialing spree and put my taint all over half the phone book. But the idea, it seems, is to take the suspects with the most connections and then eavesdrop on their conversations, without a warrant. Matthew Yglesias understands now why they didn't seek a warrant fro FISA, because the selection process for eavesdropping was tainted by this program that is very likely illegal:

If the idea was to spy on people with al-Qaeda connections, getting a warrant should have been easy. The problem is that the evidentiary basis for believing the people in question had al-Qaeda connections now turns out to have been illegally obtained evidence from the broader NSA program. And then the problem reiterates itself -- if the listening-in stage of the program reveals anything interesting, you can't use that in a court either. You can't use it to get further warrants, you can't use it as the basis of a prosecution, basically you can't use it at all. So if you want to act, you're going to need to do one of these detention-without-trials deals or maybe a "rendition" or a military tribunal or what have you. And then, once the guy's in custody, if he tells you anything you can't use that either. So the whole process starts again and soon enough there's an entire parallel justice system operating entirely in secret without any oversight or real rules.

Furthermore, this kind of data mining net, focusing on people who know people who know terrorists, is certainly going to sweep up the kind of people that are investigating terrorism... in other words, journalists. As Sadly No's Gavin says:

Christiane Amanpour, for instance, who is Iranian and is chief international correspondent for CNN, would have multiple, perhaps hundreds of high-interest connections lighting up the system like a Christmas tree. We've already heard an intriguing niblet about Amanpour being surveilled. Arianna Huffington, as well, is going to be all up in that shack. And that's where things get very, very interesting.

Here, you're the NSA. You can do this right now. Amanpour is married to James Rubin. Click on a name in James Rubin's profile. Then go to that page and click another name, and so on.

Checking out every single person in the world to find maybe 5,000 terrorists is also woefully inefficient; "If you're looking for a needle, making the haystack bigger is counterintuitive. It just doesn't make sense," as the man at the link says. And it goes against every wack-nut Republican's notion that if we just profiled for Arabs we'd have the problem solved in a few minutes. But I don't expect consistency.

One thing we do know is that this is not a limited program. And that as it continues to unspool we're going to learn just how much more expansive it is. The President and Attorney General have been intentionally misleading the public about this for the last 5 months. If they continue to do so, it's going to only get worse.

P.S. This WaPo article has some good stuff, including a reminder that none of this illegal activity really amounted to anything, presumably:

After the New York Times disclosed the eavesdropping in December, the White House dubbed it a "terrorist surveillance program" and said it involved only international communications by people with "known links" to al-Qaeda and its allies. The Washington Post reported in February that about 5,000 Americans had been subject to eavesdropping under the program and that nearly all of them had been cleared of suspicion.