[IP] Books -- The New Hows and Whys of Global Eavesdropping

[David Farber]

------ Forwarded Message
From: "John F. McMullen" <observer at westnet.com>
Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2005 00:57:49 -0500 (EST)
To: johnmac's living room <johnmacsgroup at yahoogroups.com>
Cc: Dave Farber <farber at cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: Books -- The New Hows and Whys of Global Eavesdropping

>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.


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