[Clips] All Those NSA Wiretaps Are Just a Friendster in Disguise

[R. A. Hettinga]

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  Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2006 11:09:17 -0500
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  From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
  Subject: [Clips] All Those NSA Wiretaps Are Just a Friendster in Disguise
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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 <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
  The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
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  "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
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-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
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'