NYT: US spends huge sums to spy on phone calls of American citizens

[Rose Siding]

Taking Spying to Higher Level, Agencies Look for More Ways to Mine Data

A small group of National Security Agency officials slipped into Silicon Valley on one of the agency's periodic technology shopping expeditions this month.

On the wish list, according to several venture capitalists who met with the officials, were an array of technologies that underlie the fierce debate over the Bush administration's anti-terrorist eavesdropping program: computerized systems that reveal connections between seemingly innocuous and unrelated pieces of information.
...
Admiral Poindexter, who declined to be interviewed for this article because he said he had knowledge of current classified intelligence activities, argued that his program had achieved a tenfold increase in the speed of the searching databases for foreign threats.
...
Mr. Arquilla, who was a consultant on Admiral Poindexter's Total Information Awareness project, said that the $40 billion spent each year by intelligence agencies had failed to exploit the power of data mining in correlating information readily available from public sources, like monitoring Internet chat rooms used by Al Qaeda. Instead, he said, the government has been investing huge sums in surveillance of phone calls of American citizens.
...
Last September, the N.S.A. was granted a patent for a technique that could be used to determine the physical location of an Internet address — another potential category of data to be mined. The technique, which exploits the tiny time delays in the transmission of Internet data, suggests the agency's interest in sophisticated surveillance tasks like trying to determine where a message sent from an Internet address in a cybercafe might have originated.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/25/technology/25data.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

[Rose Siding]

1. kicking it - Not exactly LBN, but an important article

The last few paragraphs are mind bending. The assertion is that the cancelling of TIA actually *harmed* an effort to protect privacy.

[cliss]

2. Exactly, and thank you RS for

putting into words what I've been saying. A country that spies on its own citizens is not moving forward. This is not a country that is productive, mobilizing all its energies towards

This is a nation that is imploding on itself.

Just imagine the amount of money that's spent on spying. There are 288 million people in this country. Imagine the amount of money, the people, the budgets to do this. The payroll alone. Now think of the number of emails, the phone calls, the letters and other communications to snoop on.

[AndyTiedye]

3. The NSA Had A Large Booth at the RSA Conference

with signs that said "INTEROPERABILITY".

But we don't WANT to interoperate with the NSA!


They did have a working Enigma machine in their booth though.