Two months ago, I described what I interpreted to be the overall purpose of the National Security Agency’s electronic surveillance system that was partially exposed by Edward Snowden, and how it most likely functions (Herald, July 7). Based on new unclassified information that has emerged, I feel quite confident that I was right. As a result, I am even more appalled at the mounting misinformation generated in the media about how the system might infringe on people’s personal liberties.
Most responsible for the misinformation is the inordinate emphasis placed on the Fourth Amendment by the media, some politicians, policy analysts and judges. Their bias elevates the protection of personal privacy above the primary duty of the government according to the Constitution to protect its citizens from foreign enemies. Their bias also ignores the importance of the balance between individual privacy and the common good – what Amitai Etzioni, professor at George Washington University, calls ”communitarian” responsibility – that is essential for a society to function effectively.
In extreme cases, some have assumed that the Fourth Amendment applies to all people in the world. There is nothing in the Constitution that prevents the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency from spying on other governments and individuals outside U.S. boundaries. All countries do it and always have. In fact, the identification and tracking of possible terrorist individuals and organizations overseas has, since Sept. 11, become a collaborative effort between many foreign government intelligence agencies and the U.S.
Further adding to the confusion is when critics who do not understand the technology draw incorrect conclusions or suggest imaginary functions the system could perform. What is missing from these discussions is that NSA surveillance takes place in three steps, and it is only the third step where human analysts interrogate actual conversations or email content. The first step is to link a known terrorist contact overseas with an unknown contact in the U.S. Because the possible domestic location is unknown, the search algorithm must have as many locations in the U.S. as possible to conduct its search. Only time and length of contact are contained in the location information that is searched in this first step. Articles that imply the system is monitoring conversations indiscriminately to detect terrorist plots demonstrate a profound ignorance of the technology.
The second step starts when a high probability linkage is detected between overseas and U.S. locations, and a general FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) approval is obtained to monitor conversations. But computer algorithms that search for key words such a bomb, al-Qaida, jihad, etc., do the monitoring. Only when such words are detected is the Federal Bureau of investigation notified, and that agency takes the third step to seek FISA authorization to listen to the conversation or read the email.
Recently, the NSA voluntarily revealed that it had incorrectly included several thousand communication sources over the last three years into the second step of the surveillance process that did not qualify as highly probable terrorist connections. In making the confession, the agency was severely criticized for making the errors by FISA judges, and the media went ballistic. The incorrect inclusion was the combined result of a glitch in the system that has since been corrected, and an unintentional consequence of the communication system itself. Because worldwide communications commingle overseas and U.S. traffic in the same fiber-optic cables and other communication lines, the NSA can occasionally inadvertently pick up purely domestic communications in its search. What are never explained in these reprehensions is that the NSA voluntarily reported the errors, and that the communication sources were only subjected to a computer word search and not the FBI type of analysis.
The reaction of the media and the FISA court to the NSA revelation is a good illustration of the Fourth Amendment bias. The surveillance system is extremely complex, and complexity always results in glitches. An example of how the media normally reacts to complexity took place about the same time as the NSA disclosure. On the afternoon of Aug. 22, the NASDAQ Stock Market, another complex system, was shut down for three hours by a glitch, and some millions of dollars were lost because of the trading interruption. Most comments in the media treated the Nasdaq difficulties as something society should learn to expect from complex systems.
In contrast, the NSA surveillance system that is even more complex, and where no private conversations or email information was subjected to human interrogation because of the glitch, the media and the courts reacted with unrelenting criticism. It seems as though irrational narcissism has taken over the country and that any infringement on individual privacy no matter how hypothetical will not be tolerated even at the expense of the common good.
Garth Buchanan holds a doctorate in applied science and has 35 years of experience in operations research. Reach him at gbuch@frontier.net.
