| > The N.S.A. achieved a technical breakthrough in 2010 when analysts first matched images collected separately in two databases — one in a huge N.S.A. database code-named Pinwale, and another in the government’s main terrorist watch list database, known as Tide — according to N.S.A. documents. Sounds like this is the answer. One of the difficult aspects of investigating terrorist networks through signals intelligence would be deciphering the network itself (which is why NSA would have been interested in phone metadata). If you had a known list of terrorist suspects (TIDE) and could match those to legally-intercepted video feeds or pictures (which is what I'm assuming PINWALE is for) then you could identify the user IDs being chatted with and then use PRISM and other approved signals interception methods to decipher "who's who in the zoo". With a better selectivity of who the targets would be then you could use targeted access operations to both get better fidelity on actual plots (instead of dumb keywords searches, actually assign analysts to get a "deep dive" into any of the plot(s) under discussion). This would also enable you to avoid wasting time and resources on people who are not a threat by filtering out "where the terrorists are not". The ideal end result: Disrupting a bombing plot before it happens. Both the 2009 and 2010 bombings were disrupted only by luck, so "clearly" the NSA didn't have the tools they needed, which is why I warn you guys that the argument "oh but they didn't catch Tsarnaev" doesn't end the way you think it does. :P ---- I know you all like to claim that counter-terrorism is just rhetoric used to justify more sinister motives, but I've found it striking how almost every time a leak is presented the evidence shows a bunch of NSA analysts trumpeting... counter-terrorism. This case is no different: "another 2011 N.S.A. document reported that a facial recognition system was queried with a photograph of Osama bin Laden.", "A 2011 PowerPoint showed one example when Tundra Freeze, the N.S.A.’s main in-house facial recognition program, was asked to identify photos matching the image of a bearded young man with dark hair.", "One N.S.A. PowerPoint presentation from 2011, for example, displays several photographs of an unidentified man — sometimes bearded, other times clean-shaven — in different settings, along with more than two dozen data points about him. These include whether he was on the Transportation Security Administration no-fly list, his passport and visa status, known associates or suspected terrorist ties, and comments made about him by informants to American intelligence agencies." There's certainly an argument to be made about whether such investigative abilities are safe for democracy, but what we've consistently not seen is a bunch of people trying to subvert democracy, not even according to the very documents NSA and their managers thought would be safest from ever being publically disclosed. |
In August 2013, a report by Reuters revealed that the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration advises DEA agents to practice parallel construction when creating criminal cases against Americans that are actually based on NSA warrantless surveillance. [1] The use of illegally-obtained evidence is generally inadmissible under the Fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine. [2]
[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/05/us-dea-sod-idUSBRE... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction