NSA Put A Premium On Collecting Info, But Not Making Sense Of It

from the needle-in-a-haystack dept

You may remember that almost exactly a decade ago, the news leaked that key Iran-Contra political operative John Poindexter, still working for the US government, had been working with the NSA to create a system called Total Information Awareness or TIA. The news quickly went viral, with people (quite reasonably) worried about the government snooping on their private data. Suddenly everyone was against this program, Poindexter was soon out of a job, and the TIA was officially put on the shelf. Except… that’s not quite what happened. As you should be aware by now, the NSA has been Hoovering up pretty much every bit of data it can, sometimes using confusing loopholes or legal changes to make it possible.

As a writeup at the NY Times notes, the NSA is basically doing everything that was promised in the TIA program… but without the basic safeguards that were included with TIA:

What’s missing, however, is a reliable way of keeping track of who sees what, and who watches whom. After T.I.A. was officially shut down in 2003, the N.S.A. adopted many of Mr. Poindexter’s ideas except for two: an application that would “anonymize” data, so that information could be linked to a person only through a court order; and a set of audit logs, which would keep track of whether innocent Americans’ communications were getting caught in a digital net.

And let’s not even waste time discussing how the NSA actually had a much cheaper program that actually did have safeguards, because the guy who exposed the world to that almost end up in jail for a few decades.

Of course, the bigger issue here is that in gathering pretty much everything they can, actually making sense of the data is becoming more and more difficult:

The N.S.A. came up with more dead ends than viable leads and put a premium on collecting information rather than making sense of it.

Of course, that doesn’t mean people’s privacy isn’t being violated (something even the NSA itself will admit when forced — though it still refuses to say how many Americans are having their privacy violated). So the end result is that the NSA is collecting all of this data, violating people’s privacy (and, most likely, the 4th Amendment). And, out of that they’re turning up very little in the way of useful leads.

That’s not exactly a compelling pitch.

But, as the NYT piece notes, even though the NSA built a system more powerful and privacy invading, and less effective (and probably more costly) than the original, much decried, Total Information Awareness program, very few people seem to be raising the alarm or particularly concerned about it. Apparently, the NSA has learned the best secret of all. If you don’t actually name the program something creepy and Big Brotherish, and don’t have a conspiracy-theory-inspired logo to go with it, you can get away with all sorts of stuff.

There. Now don’t you feel safer knowing that your tax dollars are funding this kind of thing?

Filed Under: data, nsa, privacy, spying, total information awareness