The revelation by USA Today that the NSA has been collecting the personal phone records of tens of millions of Americas has rightly raised many concerns about the program's legality (
here &
here) and its infringement on civil liberties. These concerns are all well founded and make valid arguments as to why the creation of such a program was wrong to begin with. However, what I believe to be the key argument against this massive data-mining program, which is designed to find terrorists, has been largely ignored. That is, it is not finding any terrorists. Nor is it capable of finding terrorists in the manner in which it has been described.
What this program should make very clear is that the Bush administration is completely incompetent (or
indifferent) when it comes to fighting the war on terror. Instead of taking steps to secure our ports, properly guard our borders, and develop effective counterterrorism programs the Bush administration has decided the best way to defend against terrorists is to assume everyone with a phone is potentially a member of al-Qaeda.
Let us examine how the Bush administration is keeping us safe with this illegal program. According to the USA Today article the data collected under the NSA program will be "used for social network analysis...meaning to study how terrorist networks contact each other and how they are tied together." A case study done by Valdis Krebs, a leading authority on social network analysis, demonstrates how this kind of analysis can be used to "uncloak" a terrorist network. The basic premise is that an al-Qaeda network may be unraveled by studying the connections between a known terrorist and his direct and indirect contacts (contacts' contacts).
Once suspects have been discovered, we can use their daily activities to uncloak their network. Just like they used our technology against us, we can use their planning process against them. Watch them, and listen to their conversations to see...
1. who they call / email
2. who visits with them locally and in other cities
3. where their money comes from
The structure of their extended network begins to emerge as data is discovered via surveillance.
[snip]
Once we have their direct links, the next step is to find their indirect ties -- the 'connections of their connections'. Discovering the nodes and links within two steps of the suspects usually starts to reveal much about their network. Key individuals in the local network begin to stand out.
The key point here is that in order to discover a terrorist network you must start off with a suspect. Simply analyzing the records of millions of innocent Americans will not result in anything of relevance. In fact, collecting all this data is not only unnecessary it is actually harmful to the efforts of actually finding terrorist cells.
Link
The right thing to do is to look for the best haystack, not the biggest haystack. We knew exactly which haystack to look at in the year 2000 [before the 9/11 attacks]. We just didn't do it...
The worst part -- the thing that's most disappointing to me -- is that this is not the right way to do this. It's a waste of time, a waste of resources. And it lets the real terrorists run free.
It is obvious what the Republicans' strategy will be. As soon as Democrats start bringing up civil liberty concerns they will come out with the same old lines about how Democrats are only interested in protecting privacy while Republicans are trying to save the lives of you and your children. We cannot keep falling into the same trap. Before we talk about the legal and privacy issues, we must first debunk any notion that this program is at all effective at combating terrorism. Let's put them on the defensive. Let them explain how this is stopping terrorists.
Since it is becoming clear that the narrative Democrats are developing for the upcoming mid-term elections is that Republicans are corrupt and incompetent, this is how they must frame the issue. If Democrats can manage to frame this scandal as yet another example of the Bush administration not knowing what it is doing, just like its handling of Katrina, we can erode whatever credibility they still have on national security. Democrats cannot allow the Republicans to continue framing this issues as a trade off between security and privacy.