[tkhggauwfawvyk]

Traffic analysis is a GREATER danger to innocent bystanders than recording calls, because it is all hearsay and unproven. if they tap my phone calling for a takeaway curry then it's obvious I'm innocent. If they just log that I call that number and later somebody they are 'watching' calls that same restaurant (because their relative works there) then I am secretly linked to that person in some database - this doesn't get examine in court - but I now have 'links to terrorists'

[DanielBMarkham]

You're making two mistakes.

One: you are confusing criminal law with intelligence. "hearsay" and "unproven" are criminal law concepts, used when the state wishes to deprive you of some of your rights, such as when you are being investigated or prosecuted.

Two: you are representing "link to terrorist" as some sort of boolean condition when in fact it's multi-dimensional. EVERYBODY has links to terrorists. I call the neighborhood pizza store who has an owner that SMSs PeeWee Herman on a regular basis who visits the web site of a known supporter of Hamas. We're all linked to terrorists -- it's like the seven degrees of Kevin Bacon concept. The point of meta-analysis is to take all of that random noise and gather meaningful meta-data in order to pursue.

Once the government becomes interested in me, personally, we start moving from intelligence to crime -- assuming I am a U.S. citizen. If I am a foreign citizen, then it's simply plain old intelligence-gathering.

The weirdness is that multi-node transports now can cover areas of both criminal law and intelligence gathering, but the laws are all written for one or the other. There has to be some allowance for work in-between the two concepts.

We have some precedence. It's legal, for instance, for authorities to search your trash without a warrant.There is no presumption of privacy when using computers owned by somebody else, such as your employer.

There's a lot of legal work to be done in these areas. I want the government completely out of my life, but that ain't happening. In any society in which a strong contingent wants to control and shape every form of energy I use (to prevent global warming), then we've gone beyond the old days and are in new territory. The game now, from a libertarian viewpoint, is damage control.

EDIT: I can see where we might have a misunderstanding. When you're concerned that tracking the types and messages from you is infringing on your rights, you're assuming that the government can identify you. I have no idea how NSA is doing its work, but the idea of signals intelligence is that people are just nodes. The association of the data with your identity is another subject entirely. (Of course, attributes about the node, such as location, occupation, religious history, etc. are fair game. Just not identification. Who you actually are is irrelevant.)

[fcjqbuvjxpxml]

Yes I do know how it works - my company produces the software that does this for your bank, your credit card and a bunch of 3letter agencies (hence the one-shot username). What we hand over is a big list of names that are 'linked' (for whatever degree of linked they asked for) to the terrorist/criminal/transaction in question.

The tenuous definition of'match' required by some of these customers is scary, two arabic surnames beginning with Al are assumed to have a 50% match for one agency, all chinese with the surname 'Ng' are the same person according to another!

I'm sure that somewhere in military intelligence somebody understands sifting for real patterns in this. But compared to the number of people who get refused loans, get extra security at airports or listed as 'persons of interest' the next time a child is abducted - all on the basis of a 6th degree of separation.

[DanielBMarkham]

I'm sure that somewhere in military intelligence somebody understands sifting for real patterns in this.

Then this guy needs to revamp the system. It sounds like it is horribly broken.

Having said that, you have to look at the cost-benefit ratio of both false negatives and false positives for any kind of discrimination engine. Life isn't black and white. If Fred Smith has a nuke and is somewhere overseas (and we know he'll use his real name), I'm more than happy to carefully watch all the Fred Smiths overseas that are making any kind of travel or shipping arrangements, civil liberties have nothing to do with it. That is traditional intelligence, as it applies to foreign citizens.

And this is where the conversation breaks down. Criminal law has no allowance for any kind of false positives (it is not tolerable for anybody to go to jail when they are innocent). Intelligence, on the other hand, is always dealing with probabilities -- you never expect to know fully one way or the other.

There's a fundamental incompatibility with both systems such that when they interface the language doesn't work any more. It's not going to work to try to force the concepts of one world on the other. We have to have a reasonable discussion somewhere in the middle.

[bmelton]

"I would like a special curry box lunch, fried rice, and large bomb."

Innocent indeed.

[lallysingh]

Try "I really bombed my recital." Guess how the filters & risk-averse low-level analysts take that one.