America’s “war against terror” has spawned a massive surveillance operation inside the United States that uses algorithms to sift through phone records in a bid to head off potential Al-Qaeda attacks.
Fear of terror plots after the attacks of September 11, 2001 — combined with the power of digital technology — prompted the unprecedented spying program, blurring the lines between domestic and foreign intelligence efforts.
The operation is spear-headed by the super-secret National Security Agency (NSA), a vast spy service created during the Cold War that specializes in eavesdropping, code-breaking and cyber warfare.
The data covered by the program, according to fresh revelations in a Guardian newspaper report Thursday, includes the phone numbers of both parties, the unique serial number for mobile callers, calling card numbers and the time and duration of the calls and possibly the location of mobile phone calls.
With its sophisticated software and mathematicians, the NSA uses algorithms to look for patterns in the reams of “meta-data.” Then more algorithms run through subsets of patterns, attempting to uncover contacts or conspiracies by terror suspects.
Officials defend the dragnet as a vital method to uncovering terrorist plots and insist the practice does not involve snooping on the content of citizens’ phone calls or emails.
“The information that they’re really looking for is on the other end of the calls,” said Saxby Chambliss, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“It’s — are they in contact with folks, is somebody in contact with somebody that we know to be a known terrorist?” Chambliss said.
But civil liberties groups have denounced the program as an appalling invasion of privacy and have challenged it in the courts, where the issue remains hotly disputed and unresolved.
Intelligence officials compare their data search to collecting information on the outside of an envelope.
Critics, however, say data mining is an invasive project that can create a highly-detailed portrait of an individual while building an archive for potential retroactive spying.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Universit㩠atholique de Louvain in Belgium found in a recent study they could easily identify people with just a few details from a large set of phone data.
After examining 1.5 million mobile phone users over 15 months, the researchers were able to uniquely identify 95 percent of cell phone users based on only four data points, relating to where the the caller was and what hour of the day it was in just four instances in a year.
In other words, purportedly anonymous information can be pieced together to uncover identities, and even personal habits, experts say.
The NSA, working with other government agencies, also reportedly vacuums up other “transactional data” on US territory, including bank transfers, credit-card transactions and Internet searches.
By law, the NSA is supposed to strictly avoid intelligence gathering inside the United States, but the fight against Al-Qaeda — and the agency’s unrivaled eavesdropping resources — has increasingly drawn the service into the domestic arena.
Activists say the NSA and its domestic data-mining must be reined in, accusing President Barack Obama of failing to live up his rhetoric on safeguarding constitutional liberties.
“It’s time to start the national dialogue about our rights in the digital age. And it’s time to end the NSA’s unconstitutional domestic surveillance program,” said the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has a suit against the government pending in court.
Apart from the legal debate, it remains unclear if the program has enabled the NSA to pre-empt attacks by Al-Qaeda as US officials claim.
The data-mining apparently did not succeed in uncovering some near-misses in recent years, including a failed attempt to blow up a US-bound airliner in 2009 and a botched car bomb plot in New York City in 2010.
US intel agency trawls Americans' phone records
