NSA report renews data mining concerns

“It’s not trivial to analyze all the material, but it’s trivial to get to the material,” said Barry Steinhardt, director of the technology and liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Even Skype, the popular Internet phone service that encrypts its calls — which presumably prevents sweeping monitoring of their content — is believed to be vulnerable to who’s-calling-whom traffic analysis.

Still, while the government clearly can parlay industry cooperation and technical firepower to grab lots of communications, there’s bound to be a limit.

For example, tiny, free voice-over-Internet services likely don’t bother to maintain the kinds of call logs that Verizon, BellSouth and AT&T apparently handed over, said Jeff Pulver, an authority on the technology.

Also, social network analysis would appear to be powerless against criminals and terrorists who rely on a multitude of cell phones, payphones, calling cards and Internet cafes.

And then there are more creative ways of getting off the grid. The Madrid train bombings case has revealed that the plotters communicated by sharing one e-mail account and saving messages to each other as drafts that didn’t traverse the Internet like regular mail messages would.

Privacy activists worry that the government is likely to try to overcome these surveillance gaps by making more use of the information it does have — by cross-referencing phone or other records with commercially harvested data.

One effort in that direction, the Pentagon’s infamous Total Information Awareness program, was technically shuttered by Congress, but the government still can access copious data from the private sector.

Even if the NSA’s surveillance went no further than the NSA’s access to phone billing records, it clearly would raise hackles.

The time and destination of dialed phone calls has long been available to authorities through “pen registers” and “trap and trace” devices — but with a court order. USA Today noted that concerns about the legality of the NSA’s phone-call database led Qwest Communications International Inc. to refuse to participate.

“A court order couldn’t be obtained to just wholesale surveil,” said Kurt Opsahl, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is suing AT&T in San Francisco. “The legal standard requires something more specific. You can’t get everybody’s data unless you have some suspicion.”

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