The NSA Data-Mining Program

Posted on December 26, 2005

The New York Times reports that the breadth and depth of the NSA's warrantless spying program is much greater than was originally reported.

The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.
The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.
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What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation. The current and former government officials who discussed the program were granted anonymity because it remains classified.
Bush administration officials declined to comment on Friday on the technical aspects of the operation and the N.S.A.'s use of broad searches to look for clues on terrorists. Because the program is highly classified, many details of how the N.S.A. is conducting it remain unknown, and members of Congress who have pressed for a full Congressional inquiry say they are eager to learn more about the program's operational details, as well as its legality.

The phone companies cooperated with this data mining operation, in which the NSA basically jacked into the main phone and email lines and eavesdropped on huge numbers of communications, hoping to find some kind of usable intel. The more we learn about what Bush and the NSA have been doing, the more disturbing it becomes. It's starting to look like that proposed illegal data mining program ("Total Information Awareness") thought up by convicted Watergate felon Admiral Poindexter has been put into service after all -- without first consulting Congress or the American people.