Cast a Giant Net; FBI Wants Your "Community of Interest"
Sat Sep 08, 2007 at 10:21:50 AM PDT
This just in:
From the New York Times:
The F.B.I. cast a much wider net in its terrorism investigations than it has previously acknowledged by relying on telecommunications companies to analyze phone-call and e-mail patterns of the associates of Americans who had come under suspicion, according to newly obtained bureau records.
Essentially, we are now being told that so-called "communities of interest," of a terror suspect's network of people with whom contact is made, are also the subjects of telecommunications analysis by the FBI, though the project has allegedly been halted while the Bureau is currently under scrutiny for abuses of process as it relates to the national security letters.
Don't be so sure.
Is there any doubt that, even with these revelations, we are only seeing the thin edge of what survaillance activities have been purpetrated on American citizens by this administration? Though Bureau officials will not confirm anything, claiming it they cannot in light of the ongoing NSL investigations, unnamed sources have confirmed that, "[t]he data was limited to people, phone numbers and e-mail 'once removed' from the actual target of the national security letters."
It appears more and more evident that the once removed standard similarly applies to the degree of deceitfulness that the administration is willing to engage in, all in the name of national security, for no matter how far they are willing to admit they go, further investigation and time ultimately demonstrate that they actually go one step further than they were previously willing to admit. So it went with the warrantless wiretaps, to which Gonzales was willing to say--but was proven to have lied--had been limited to purely foreign calls, then calls in which one party was outside US soil, then to calls routed through the US.
Does anyone seriously doubt that warrantless wiretaps have been approved by the FBI, not the courts, for purely domestic calls? The only question is: When will they admit to it?
And so it goes here; we may as well face it that this adminstration's community of interest, given the almost limitless ability to track such information, is the entire country.
"This sort of analysis of calling patterns and who the communities of interests are is the sort of things telephone companies are doing anyway because it’s central to their businesses for marketing or optimizing the network or detecting fraud," said Professor Blaze , who has worked with the F.B.I. on technology issues.
Such "analysis is extremely powerful and very revealing because you get these linkages between people that wouldn’t be otherwise clear, sometimes even more important than the content itself" of phone calls and e-mail messages, he said. "But it’s also very invasive. There’s always going to be a certain amount of noise," with data collected on people who have no real links to suspicious activity, he said.
And you thought "friends and family" was just a marketing come-on . . .
