Interesting Article on NSA and phone monitoring

[Pangloss]

Since we've been discussing this in the thread here, I thought you guys might find this story over at MSNBC interesting, about the way the NSA is changing with the times. It has a lot of little tidbits about how they're incorporating newer data mining and artificial intelligence techniques to analyze data on a mass scale rather than individual cases at random (which we've talked about previously in this thread).

 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10561911/

 

A couple of interesting quotes from this lengthy article:

 

Instead of simply intercepting a single phone or a single e-mail address, the NSA is now taking whatever it can get from a variety of sources, including the hard drives of terrorist computers, and creating wide “influence nets” or “social network analyses” that encompass not just the original target, but his or her contacts. In some cases, the casting of such a wide net can lead to surveillance of thousands of people.

 

“One standard, the old one, is that you’re monitoring a person or group,” Arkin says. “The other is you have established a profile and you’re looking for people who might fit that profile … for example, Muslim men who go to strip clubs. Don’t laugh. All the 9/11 hijackers went to strip clubs.”

 

“Motivations, socioeconomic backgrounds, connections, you might able to identify them in the massive link-analysis world, it’s about extracting intelligence from massive amounts of data," Arkin says, "In fact, the NSA secret program to develop advanced analytic techniques is called NIMD, Novel Intelligence in Massive Data.”

 

A Western diplomat told NBC News this spring that the NSA had the city of Riyadh so “wired” that, using traditional methods and geo-location profiles, it was able to provide Saudi security forces with the addresses of specific "safe houses" where al-Qaida operatives were hiding.

[ecoli]

nice article, but it's not really surprising... you'd expect that the NSA would want to keep their techniques up to date, because you know that terrorists aren't going to keep doing the same things if they are getting caught.

[Helix]

Nice article, Pangloss. You had said you wanted to post a thread about the NSA and I assume this is it? The NSa has changed a lot over time but, in my view, not so much because of technology as the enemies we face. Terrorists are very porous and cannot be tracked easily, hence the NSA creates a "web of influence". Profiling also would work, as they are dealing with a large demographic of suspects.

[Pangloss]

I think the technical aspects of this are interesting, and this article updated my knowledge of what the NSA generally does past the point of the Bamford books that I read in recent years. It was also interesting from the perspective of just completing a Master's degree which raised my level of knowledge about AI, data mining, search algorithms, etc, and the various applications of them. Having spent quite a lot of time over the last year in the ACM Portal perusing academic articles (zzzzz), I can't help but wonder now how many of those were also being perused by NSA planners and scientists and mathemeticians. It's interesting getting a little glimpse into their world here.