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David Lazer
(Methodology, Networked Governance)

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Stanley Wasserman
(Current Trends, Methodology, Social Networks)
Guy Stuart
(Economic Sociology, Finance)
Allan Friedman
(Simulations)
Nathan Eagle
(Technology, Social Computing, Powerlaws, Current Trends)
Ben Waber
(Technology, Social Computing) Ines Mergel
(Knowledge Sharing, Social Computing, Social Software, Current Trends)
Maria Binz-Scharf
(Qualitative Methodology, Knowledge Sharing, eGovernment)
Alexander Schellong
(Admin, eGovernment, Citizen Relationship Management)

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    « ABC/Washington Post survey on privacy | Main | What do we really see? - The deep and the surface web »

    17 January 2006

    Excerpts from Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends

    Excerpts from today's front page NYT article below. Three things to take away from this article: (1) that there was a snowball-type of analysis from the relational data collected; (2) there was some degree of content analysis of communication (although not clear that voice recognition was involved); and (3) the signal to noise ratio seems to be unacceptable (to the point of being humorous).

    The next entry on this (and then I will return to more traditional points of discussion for the blog) will be on potential
    collateral uses of these data.

    January 17, 2006
    Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends
    By LOWELL BERGMAN, ERIC LICHTBLAU, SCOTT SHANE and DON VAN NATTA Jr.

    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....

    "We'd chase a number, find it's a schoolteacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed," said one former F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration."...

    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 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."...

    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.

    Posted by David Lazer at January 17, 2006 10:38 PM