The USA Today article on the NSA phone record database fails to ask the important question:
what are they actually doing with the information?
Besides whatever database the NSA may be building, or whatever data mining might be occurring, I believe a hint can be found in this New York Times article from Janaury 17, 2006.
At the time of its publication, the article was tied into the "terrorist surveillance" program. In reality, it might have to do more with the NSA program revealed today.
More below...
You might remember the article:
Spy Agency Data after Sept. 11 Led FBI to Dead Ends
By Lowell Bergman, Eric Lichtblau, Scott Shane, and Don Van Natta Jr.
The New York Times
Tuesday 17 January 2006
Washington - In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.
But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.
The FBI was sent on numerous wild goose chases in the months after 9/11. This would be contemporaneous with the "contract with the NSA" between the phone companies, "which launched the program in 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks," as described by USA Today.
But the real clue that the phone numbers FBI agents were given to hunt down may have come from these contracts can be found in this part of the NY Times article:
Officials who were briefed on the N.S.A. program said the agency collected much of the data passed on to the F.B.I. as tips by tracing phone numbers in the United States called by suspects overseas, and then by following the domestic numbers to other numbers called. In other cases, lists of phone numbers appeared to result from the agency's computerized scanning of communications coming into and going out of the country for names and keywords that might be of interest. The deliberate blurring of the source of the tips caused some frustration among those who had to follow up.
F.B.I. field agents, who were not told of the domestic surveillance programs, complained that they often were given no information about why names or numbers had come under suspicion. A former senior prosecutor who was familiar with the eavesdropping programs said intelligence officials turning over the tips "would always say that we had information whose source we can't share, but it indicates that this person has been communicating with a suspected Al Qaeda operative." He said, "I would always wonder, what does 'suspected' mean?"
"The information was so thin," he said, "and the connections were so remote, that they never led to anything, and I never heard any follow-up."
In response to the F.B.I. complaints, the N.S.A. eventually began ranking its tips on a three-point scale, with 3 being the highest priority and 1 the lowest, the officials said. Some tips were considered so hot that they were carried by hand to top F.B.I. officials. But in bureau field offices, the N.S.A. material continued to be viewed as unproductive, prompting agents to joke that a new bunch of tips meant more "calls to Pizza Hut," one official, who supervised field agents, said.
If my suspicion is correct, and the FBI was chasing down people that had been identified through data mining of phone records, this would answer a nagging question for me about this story when it first appeared. Specifically, how is it that the NSA was giving the FBI such a "flood" of information? Are there really that many people in the US making phone calls overseas to suspected al Qaeda operatives?
That just did not make sense. But, a data mining operation would. It would bring up tons of potential "leads" or "hits" based on the millions and millions of phone calls made everyday, and reflected in the records NSA had obtained from the phone companies.
Data mining would also allow the quick turnaround time, whereas listening in to international phone calls would not. Eavesdropped phone calls would likely require listening in to more than one call, and necessitate deciphering codewords. But, the NY Times article makes it clear that the FBI was hunting down tons of "leads" in a matter of months.
Finally, a data mining system would also allow the NSA to create the "ranking" system they apparently used. It would also explain the incredibly high rate of "false positives" that came back in only a matter of months.
Some more digging needs to be done!