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From: "John F. McMullen"
From the New York Times -- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/02/books/02grim.html
BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'CHATTER' The New Hows and Whys of Global Eavesdropping By WILLIAM GRIMES Remember chatter? After 9/11, it was all over the news. For months, snatches of cellphone conversations in Karachi or Tora Bora routinely made the front page. Television newscasters could chill the blood instantly by reporting on "increased levels of chatter" somewhere in the ether. But what exactly was it? Who was picking it up, and how were they making sense of it? Patrick Radden Keefe does his best to answer these questions and demystify a very mysterious subject in "Chatter," a beginner's guide to the world of electronic espionage and the work of the National Security Agency, responsible for communications security and signals intelligence, or "sigint." In a series of semiautonomous chapters, he describes Echelon, the vast electronic intelligence-gathering system operated by the United States and its English-speaking allies; surveys the current technology of global eavesdropping; and tries to sort out the vexed issue of privacy rights versus security demands in a world at war with terrorism. Mr. Keefe writes, crisply and entertainingly, as an interested private citizen rather than an expert. A third-year student at Yale Law School, he follows in the footsteps of freelance investigators like James Bamford, who, through sheer persistence, managed to penetrate at least some of the multiple layers of secrecy surrounding the National Security Agency in his book "The Puzzle Palace." "Chatter" is a much breezier affair, filled with anecdotes, colorful quotes and arresting statistics. The United States has fewer than 5,000 spies operating around the world, for example, but 30,000 eavesdroppers. The National Security Agency employs more mathematicians than any other organization in the world, and every three hours its spy satellites gather enough information to fill the Library of Congress. Menwith Hill, the American listening station in North Yorkshire, England, has a staff as large as MI5, Britain's domestic intelligence service. Menwith Hill is just one in a network of American-run bases and overhead satellites that, Mr. Keefe writes, "have wrapped the earth in a spectral web of electronic surveillance." In some respects, their task is not that tough. "The air around us and the sky above us are a riot of signals," Mr. Keefe writes. "To intercept those signals is as easy as putting a cup out in the rain." As fiber-optic cables become the main channel for data transmission, surveillance will become more difficult, but at the moment the ability to collect electronic signals is far outstripping the ability to analyze it. Some messages are chatter. Others are chit-chat. In February 2003, the New York City police went on high alert, sending special teams into the subways and posting extra police at the tunnels leading in and out of Manhattan, all because the word "underground" had been picked up in an intercepted conversation between terrorists. Nothing happened. Was the word or the context misinterpreted? Or did the police presence thwart an attack? It's impossible to know. The National Security Agency has invested heavily in technology while cutting back on human analysts and foreign-language interpreters with the skill to detect shades of nuance in casual conversations. Should it now reinvest in training people fluent in Baluchi, the dialect spoken by Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker in the 9/11 attacks? By the time their training is completed, voice-recognition technology may have turned out to be the smart bet. Sigint is a murky business. "Chatter" is often quite amusing. Mr. Keefe has great fun with Total Information Awareness, the ill-fated antiterrorist program announced by the Pentagon in the late summer of 2003. By linking private and government databases, Total Awareness would pick up on every electronic click, ping or chirp created by private citizens in the course of their daily lives. The very name, Mr. Keefe, points out, was ominous, Orwellian. So was the symbol for the Information Awareness Office, a pyramid with an eye on top surveying planet Earth. "In case anyone had any doubt about the program's intentions, the Web site bore the motto scientia est potentia, 'knowledge is power,' " Mr. Keefe writes. Hastily, the name was changed to Terrorism Information Awareness, but a suspicious Congress strangled the program in its cradle. That sounds like cause for celebration. But, as Mr. Keefe points out, that program might have noticed when $10,000 was wired to a Florida SunTrust bank account in the name of Mohamed Atta on July 19, 2000, or set off alarm bells when a dozen men, some of them on terrorist watch lists and others with lapsed visas, bought one-way tickets on flights departing at about the same time on Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Keefe is a privacy agnostic. He does not know quite where to draw the line between legitimate national security concerns and the privacy rights of citizens. Somewhat feebly, he calls for vigorous debate on the issue. By temperament and by vocation, he loathes the secrecy culture of national spy agencies, but he has no patience with conspiracy theorists and idealists, like the German Green Party member who concluded in a European Union report on Echelon and its dangers that secret services cannot be controlled, and "must therefore be abolished." Mr. Keefe seems almost as nave, though, when he notes, in astonishment, that the National Security Agency does not publish a list of its employees, and that they are not allowed to write about their work in their diaries. Imagine that. In the end, Mr. Keefe allows everyone involved in the debate to have a say. He even gives equal time to a Defense Department official who tells him, bluntly, "the only people who think that intelligence wins wars - hot or cold - are intelligence people." So much for chatter. And you should see the phone bill. CHATTER Dispatches From the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping By Patrick Radden Keefe 300 pages. Random House. $24.95. ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen@leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]