USA Today reports that three big telecommonication companies, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, have delivered and are delivering all call detail records (CDRs) of domestic and international phonecalls to the NSA. Quest as the fourth biggest provider did not deliver such records, for doubts on the legality and fear of fines, even as it was pressured to do so.
CDRs include the callers telephone number, the number called, the start time and the end time of a call. They do not include the call content, i.e. the talk. The companies deny to have delivered additional information, like addresses or customer names. USA Today only reported on fixed phone lines. But we can reasonably assume that cell phone and voice over Internet call data is also used.
The NSA, as someone tells USA Today is, "to create a database of every call ever made". That can be done. But how useful might this attempt be?
I believe that that indentifying terrorist networks through this can not succeed and that the program thereby does not add to the security of the people.
But history has shown that such datacollections can be and will be abused. The NSA program thereby decreses the security of the people and should be abolished.
The NSA is said to use the data to do "social network analysis" to identify terrorist networks.
I have worked intensively with CDRs for billing purposes and to project usage behaviour for international internet service and telco providers. Pure CDRs will give you interesting data on "social network analysis". But only in a statistical sense.
On a Sunday afternoon I did get an emergency call by an U.S. based online service. Their network folks thought their European access network had gone down when they saw a sudden and massive drop of online traffic. I, like many million others in Europe, was watching a Formula 1 race, so the reason was immediate clear to me, but I missed some race laps while explaining the importance of Formula 1 in Europe.
So the NSA may be able to group NASCAR loving households as their call volume will be low through a race and spike immediately when its over. It may be able to group the households with teenage girls as, except for vacation time, their line will light up shortly after school.
But pure CDR analysis will only get you down to social groups with ten-thousands of members, not to small terrorist groups. The NSA must add to that information which is easy as there are many address databases that include the phonenumbers. They will have those plus mortgage data, credit card information, tax-data and maybe medical and/or insurance records.
The NSA did, as Technology Review reported, take over Pointdexters Total Information Awareness Project which was planed for such dataprocessing.
Still, with all this information available, how far down can "social network analysis" go? What defines a "terrorist" social network? What identifies it? What is the minimum group size that is identifyable by this datamining?
The official report on the London bombing on July 7 2005 shows that there was only very, very little that could have enabled the identification of this small group of domestic suicide bombers before their deeds.
Four domestic folks, with no foreign connection, who had a few things in common and a lot of things not in common. They did not use the same hairdresser, did not buy their food at the same market and went to different doctors. The were a social network overlayed with other social networks they did not have in common. No datamining I can think of would have identified them as what they turned out to be.
Datamining is useless for finding small groups that behave normal except in one social issue. Datamining will deliver a lot of "suspect" behavior of small groups and individual people. But the sheer size of the possibilities will find ten-thousands or hundred-thousands of "suspects" without identifying any real terrorist other than by chance.
Indeed the FBI has complained about the trash of thousands of false tips that resulted from the program and that the NSA delivered to them.
The NSA datamining attempt is useless to find terrorist "social networks". Therefor the program should be buried.
Unless of course there are other "social networks" one wants to keep an ear on.