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Wanted: Competent big brother From Michael Hirsh's Newsweek column Wednesday: The legal controversy over the NSA surveillance program has obscured an intelligence issue that is at least as important to the nation's future: sheer competence. Do we have any idea what we're doing? One reason the NSA is listening in on so many domestic conversations fruitlessly--???few of the thousands of tips panned out, according to The Washington Post--???is that the agency barely has a clue as to who, or what, it is supposed to be monitoring. While soaking up the lion's share of the $40 billion annual intel budget, the NSA continues to preside over an antiquated cold-war apparatus, one designed to listen in on official communications pipelines in nation-states. Today it is overwhelmed by cell-phone and Internet traffic. While terror groups multiply, the NSA is still waiting for the next Soviet Union to arise (which many in the Pentagon see as China, say, 50 to 100 years from now). As a December 2002 report by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee noted, "Only a tiny fraction" of the NSA's 650 million daily intercepts worldwide "are actually ever reviewed by humans, and much of what is collected gets lost in the deluge of data." What went wrong? The NSA, using traditional defense contractors like Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), sought to do too much at once, applying a clunky top-down solution to what was a Silicon Valley problem, says Ed Giorgio, who was the chief codebreaker at NSA for 30 years. "The biggest problem with Trailblazer was there was a grand theory of unification that was going to solve the problem, as if the 'central committee' could really do what's best done by a distributed network of people," he says. Adds Fred Cohen, a former computer scientist at Sandia Labs: "The scope and magnitude of this problem is enormous. What they have failed at historically and are failing to do today is to put out enough small money to enough different creative thinkers to explore a lot more possibilities." By most accounts, no one at senior levels has a good idea of how to replace the failed Trailblazer. Now, time's awasting. Former NSA senior director Philip Bobbitt, writing recently in The New York Times, provided a vivid example of the importance of data mining and pattern analysis. On Sept. 10, 2001, he wrote, the NSA intercepted two messages: ''The match begins tomorrow'' and ''Tomorrow is zero hour.'' They were picked up from random monitoring of pay phones in areas of Afghanistan where Al Qaeda was active. No one knew what to make of them, and in any case they were not translated or disseminated until Sept. 12. But "had we at the time cross-referenced credit card accounts, frequent-flyer programs and a cellphone number shared by those two men, data mining might easily have picked up on the 17 other men linked to them and flying on the same day at the same time on four flights," Bobbitt wrote. Today the NSA seems hardly more capable of piecing together the next "tomorrow is zero hour" intercept. ---------------------------------------------------
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