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Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 11:09:17 -0500
To: Philodox Clips List
From: "R. A. Hettinga"
Subject: [Clips] All Those NSA Wiretaps Are Just a Friendster in Disguise
Reply-To: rah@philodox.com
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http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060126.html
PBS: I, Cringely -- The Pulpit
January 26, 2006
The Falafel Connection
All Those NSA Wiretaps Are Just a Friendster in Disguise
By Robert X. Cringely
We'll get back to wiretapping in a moment, but first there's the obvious
story this week of Disney buying Pixar, which nobody but me seems to think
is about estate planning for Steve Jobs.
The guy had 80 percent of his wealth tied-up in Pixar. That kind of holding
is very difficult to sell on the open market. A $4 billion sell order? I
don't think so. Remember this is someone who less than two years ago had a
form of pancreatic cancer that has only a 50 percent five-year survival
rate. I'm not saying Jobs is going to die, but I AM saying that he is in a
position where he has to think about these things and his financial
position at Pixar was untenable for his family, and left him too exposed if
Cars turns out to be a lemon.
So the sale to Disney gives Jobs a smaller piece of a bigger pie and
therefore much easier liquidity. But it also gives him the chance to nag
Disney into the 21st century, as I am sure he will. Strong minority
shareholders tend to clash with management (look at Ross Perot with General
Motors and Ted Turner with Time-Warner), and Jobs will do the same with
Disney. He'll push to end Disney's partnership with Microsoft, to bring
Disney into the Apple-Intel alliance, and potentially try for some
partnership with Sony, too. It's the start of a grand amalgamation based
around a combination of content, technology, and networking, and I wouldn't
at all be surprised to see it end as a single huge company five years from
now with Jobs at the helm.
Just as Gil Amelio should have at Apple, Robert Iger from Disney had better
be looking over his shoulder.
Now back to wiretapping. After last week's column, a number of readers
wrote to explain that the National Security Agency's problem with complying
with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) had to do with the
sheer volume of wiretaps involved, which they guessed numbers in the
millions or billions. Evidently, these worried readers think, the NSA has
been long listening-in to ALL of our calls, and thought that might not go
down well with the secret court that issues FISA warrants.
I don't think so.
The NSA has a very advanced program called Echelon for monitoring radio
communication around the world, and probably intercepts a lot of phone
calls that way, but for FISA-type wiretaps they tend to use the same
outsourcing firms the phone companies use, and these generally tiny outfits
can only handle a few thousand taps per year each.
By the way, if you are wondering whether YOUR phone could be easily tapped,
just check to see if your phone company offers three-way dialing, because
that's the feature we're talking about. If you can get it, they can get
you. And if you are wondering whether VoIP service can't be tapped, the
answer is both yes and no. For the moment, SIP services like Skype can't be
tapped but that will change soon. And if you are a Vonage or Packet8 user,
well they already have your number.
Here's what is most likely going on with the NSA and FISA from a guy who
used to work for the NSA:
"What I think is going on here is that they're using social network
analysis. They get some numbers or endpoints of interest, and start out
with classical traffic analysis, which can all be done (as I think you
pointed out) with pen registers or their moral equivalent. They look for
other numbers, and follow the graph of connections by transitivity.
"It's well known that any graph of associations in the real world tends to
generate cliques, and that the clique size for a social group of any sort
tends to actually be fairly small. This is the 'six degrees of Kevin Bacon'
effect. But in a social network, there will also be people with many edges
coming to them, and many paths in the transitive closure of the graph of
their relationships, and those people are often 'centers.'
"In fact, just that sort of analysis was done -- after the fact -- of the
9/11 hijackers (in this week's links).
"I would guess that the SNA is used to identify people of interest --
although there would be some false positives, like if they all rented
apartments from the same rental management firm, or all ordered from the
same we-deliver falafel place. But someone who shows up in the transitive
network of a lot of calls from overseas, and is also a high edge-count in
the SNA graph, is definitely someone to be interested in. I wouldn't be at
all surprised if that's when they apply for a FISA warrant and start
actually intercepting."
So what we have the NSA doing is probably data mining, calling records in
order to identify the people they want to order intercepts on. They are
doing it without warrants because they like being sneaky, don't think they
could get past the FISA court a warrant for 100 million calling records,
and because the FISA law from 1978 probably doesn't distinguish between a
pen-trap and an intercept.
If that's really the case, this doesn't sound quite as bad as we've feared.
I feel better thinking that they are culling calling records rather than
listening-in to my conversations. And it makes a lot more sense, from a
pure technical capability standpoint.
So why couldn't they just tell us? Why couldn't they have simply amended
the FISA law to take such activities into account? Because they like to be
sneaky, tend to distrust even the people who pay them (that's us), and
because they for some reason think that the bad guys won't figure this out
for themselves.
Duh.
This is far from the first instance of such unartful phone tapping, as my
friend Mike Class reports from Chicago. Though I didn't know it until we'd
been e-mailing back and forth for years, Mike is the Socius to the
Provincial -- effectively the number two Jesuit in the Windy City:
"Here's one more tidbit on wire-taps: They get you free phone service! The
feds tapped the phone of the Sisters of Mercy in Washington D.C. because of
some anti-war stance or something they took in the 1980s. The good sisters
noticed some kind of clicking on the phone at times, and finally decided
that someone must have tapped into their phone. Their solution: Don't pay
the bill so the phone company will have to shut off the phone. The phone
never went dead, and they quit sending them bills! The Feds wouldn't let Ma
Bell shut them down, and probably began paying the bills. The sisters
talked long and free with their friends across the country!"
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R. A. Hettinga
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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R. A. Hettinga
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'