While Congress and the blogosphere debates the legality of President Bush’s executive orders putting the National Security Agency in the business of tapping American citizens communications without a court warrant, the tech site ArsTechnica offers an intriguing theory about the underlying technology being used by the NSA, and a possible explanation for the government’s reluctance to use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court process for their wiretaps. Extrapolating from various public statements indicating that new technology was involved, ArsTechnica writer Hannibal surmises that
It is entirely possible that the NSA technology at issue here is some kind of high-volume, automated voice recognition and pattern matching system. Now, I don’t at all believe that all international calls are or could be monitored with such a system, or anything like that. Rather, the NSA could very easily narrow down the amount of phone traffic that they’d have to a relatively small fraction of international calls with some smart filtering. First, they’d only monitor calls where one end of the connection is in a country of interest. Then, they’d only need the ability to do a roving random sample of a few seconds from each call in that already greatly narrowed pool of calls.
This might mean a much broader spectrum of calls are being listened in on–perhaps as many as 1 percent of all calls in all major US cities, Hannibal notes after digging up some smart thoughts on this subject from cryptology expert Phil Zimmerman. According to Hannibal, Zimmerman wrote back in 1999:
A year after the CALEA [Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994] passed, the FBI disclosed plans to require the phone companies to build into their infrastructure the capacity to simultaneously wiretap 1 percent of all phone calls in all major U.S. cities. This would represent more than a thousandfold increase over previous levels in the number of phones that could be wiretapped. In previous years, there were only about a thousand court-ordered wiretaps in the United States per year, at the federal, state, and local levels combined. It’s hard to see how the government could even employ enough judges to sign enough wiretap orders to wiretap 1 percent of all our phone calls, much less hire enough federal agents to sit and listen to all that traffic in real time. The only plausible way of processing that amount of traffic is a massive Orwellian application of automated voice recognition technology to sift through it all, searching for interesting keywords or searching for a particular speaker’s voice. If the government doesn’t find the target in the first 1 percent sample, the wiretaps can be shifted over to a different 1 percent until the target is found, or until everyone’s phone line has been checked for subversive traffic. The FBI said they need this capacity to plan for the future. This plan sparked such outrage that it was defeated in Congress. But the mere fact that the FBI even asked for these broad powers is revealing of their agenda.
One percent of all the calls in all major US cities! That is hardly a number that the Administration wants to go to FISA’s judges for permission. At the same time, if the NSA is using a much more powerful system for sifting those calls, actual human eavesdropping on specific calls might be much narrower, and only on those calls that actually contain enough trigger words or patterns to fit some profile.
Nevertheless, if this is the case, it represents a real leap in the technological power of the government to monitor its citizens. The FISA process was put in place when the government was seeking a couple hundred or thousand taps at a time. (Apparently, the government has sought about 19,000 wiretaps and gotten permission for all but five, in all the years since the FISA process was established.) Now, it’s conceivable that the government is listening in on millions of Americans.
When technology rushes ahead, the political process has to catch up and deal with it.