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Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN
12/24/05 "New
York Times" -- -- WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 - The National
Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone
and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United
States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush
approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of
terrorist activity, according to current and former government
officials.
The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and
voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than
the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was
collected by tapping directly into some of the American
telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.
As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic
surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation
of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access
to streams of domestic and international communications, the
officials said.
The government's collection and analysis of phone and Internet
traffic have raised questions among some law enforcement and
judicial officials familiar with the program. One issue of concern
to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reviewed
some separate warrant applications growing out of the N.S.A.'s
surveillance program, is whether the court has legal authority over
calls outside the United States that happen to pass through
American-based telephonic "switches," according to officials
familiar with the matter.
"There was a lot of discussion about the switches" in conversations
with the court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the
gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows.
"You're talking about access to such a vast amount of
communications, and the question was, How do you minimize something
that's on a switch that's carrying such large volumes of traffic?
The court was very, very concerned about that."
Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance
program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his
executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited
to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications
involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.
What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians,
besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have
combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search
of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials
describe the program as a large data-mining operation.
The current and former government officials who discussed the
program were granted anonymity because it remains classified.
Bush administration officials declined to comment on Friday on the
technical aspects of the operation and the N.S.A.'s use of broad
searches to look for clues on terrorists. Because the program is
highly classified, many details of how the N.S.A. is conducting it
remain unknown, and members of Congress who have pressed for a full
Congressional inquiry say they are eager to learn more about the
program's operational details, as well as its legality.
Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who
have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to
analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who
is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it
is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail
messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to
have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11
attacks, the officials said.
This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States
would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the
government wanted to trace who calls whom.
The use of similar data-mining operations by the Bush administration
in other contexts has raised strong objections, most notably in
connection with the Total Information Awareness system, developed by
the Pentagon for tracking terror suspects, and the Department of
Homeland Security's Capps program for screening airline passengers.
Both programs were ultimately scrapped after public outcries over
possible threats to privacy and civil liberties.
But the Bush administration regards the N.S.A.'s ability to trace
and analyze large volumes of data as critical to its expanded
mission to detect terrorist plots before they can be carried out,
officials familiar with the program say. Administration officials
maintain that the system set up by Congress in 1978 under the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not give them the speed
and flexibility to respond fully to terrorist threats at home.
A former technology manager at a major telecommunications company
said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the
industry have been storing information on calling patterns and
giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible
terrorists.
"All that data is mined with the cooperation of the government and
shared with them, and since 9/11, there's been much more active
involvement in that area," said the former manager, a
telecommunications expert who did not want his name or that of his
former company used because of concern about revealing trade
secrets.
Such information often proves just as valuable to the government as
eavesdropping on the calls themselves, the former manager said.
"If they get content, that's useful to them too, but the real plum
is going to be the transaction data and the traffic analysis," he
said. "Massive amounts of traffic analysis information - who is
calling whom, who is in Osama Bin Laden's circle of family and
friends - is used to identify lines of communication that are then
given closer scrutiny."
Several officials said that after President Bush's order authorizing
the N.S.A. program, senior government officials arranged with
officials of some of the nation's largest telecommunications
companies to gain access to switches that act as gateways at the
borders between the United States' communications networks and
international networks. The identities of the corporations involved
could not be determined.
The switches are some of the main arteries for moving voice and some
Internet traffic into and out of the United States, and, with the
globalization of the telecommunications industry in recent years,
many international-to-international calls are also routed through
such American switches.
One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked
at the N.S.A. said that to exploit its technological capabilities,
the American government had in the last few years been quietly
encouraging the telecommunications industry to increase the amount
of international traffic that is routed through American-based
switches.
The growth of that transit traffic had become a major issue for the
intelligence community, officials say, because it had not been fully
addressed by 1970's-era laws and regulations governing the N.S.A.
Now that foreign calls were being routed through switches on
American soil, some judges and law enforcement officials regarded
eavesdropping on those calls as a possible violation of those
decades-old restrictions, including the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for
domestic surveillance.
Historically, the American intelligence community has had close
relationships with many communications and computer firms and
related technical industries. But the N.S.A.'s backdoor access to
major telecommunications switches on American soil with the
cooperation of major corporations represents a significant expansion
of the agency's operational capability, according to current and
former government officials.
Phil Karn, a computer engineer and technology expert at a major West
Coast telecommunications company, said access to such switches would
be significant. "If the government is gaining access to the switches
like this, what you're really talking about is the capability of an
enormous vacuum operation to sweep up data," he said.
Copyright 2005The New York Times Company
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