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Wholesale Snooping Elise Ackerman and K. Oanh Ha / Mercury News | May 28 2006 Powerful computers, huge databases and new data-mining techniques -- many with roots in Silicon Valley -- lie at the heart of the uproar over allegations that the super-secret National Security Agency has been monitoring the telephone calls and Internet traffic of millions of Americans. While the NSA's activities remain murky, one thing has become clear: Rapidly evolving technology can enable the government to quickly comb through troves of personal information in its efforts to identify terror suspects and monitor everything from their telephone calls to their financial transactions. ``I call this wholesale surveillance,'' said Bruce Schneier, founder and chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security. ``The police-state dream is now possible.'' Thanks to sophisticated new software and exponential increases in computing power, it has become easy to monitor people's phone calls, read their e-mail, eavesdrop on their chat sessions, peer at their digital photos and follow them from one Web page to the next. Even if a terrorism suspect switches phone numbers every week, data-mining tools that predict behavior with mathematical algorithms can still pinpoint him by the pattern of his calls. Software that analyzes text to break codes and identify unusual activity can monitor Internet traffic, chat-room buzz and Web sites. One manufacturer of software that converts recorded conversations into searchable patterns claims its product is so refined it can distinguish between anger and sincerity when a person says, ``You've been really helpful.'' While some of those capabilities may be used by corporations to enhance customer service or market their products, they also can help law enforcement and intelligence agencies hunt terrorists. Just 10 years ago, government eavesdropping usually meant conventional wiretaps at a suspect's residence. Warrants were required, and so were human monitors to listen to the recorded communications. Then the Internet changed everything. Americans began chronicling their lives in a flood of daily e-mails and instant messages. They flocked to online chat rooms and auction sites. They started using the Web to pay their bills, check their investment portfolios, consult with psychics and arrange romantic encounters. Some people realized they were leaving digital tracks on servers all over the country every time they went online. However, the idea of government agencies or private companies sifting through all that data seemed preposterous. But since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, those digital tracks have become a greater focus of attention for law enforcement and intelligence agencies. `The perfect storm' ``Nine-eleven provided the catalyst for this to really grow,'' said Aviel Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University. ``It was the perfect storm of surveillance where you had technology meeting the need and the desire of law enforcement, combined with the availability of the information.'' Eager to prevent more terrorist attacks, government agencies began looking for powerful new surveillance tools. They found them in software originally developed for commercial purposes ranging from billing for Internet services to indexing digital images. Some of the companies received funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture-capital arm of the CIA. In-Q-Tel also licenses some of the products to government agencies. The FBI's Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force told the federal Government Accountability Office during a 2004 investigation that it was tapping into records from 29 government sources -- including data kept by immigration, visa and customs officials -- as well as records from 11 commercial sources. Among the powerful tools now available is software from Narus, a Mountain View company whose name is derived from a Latin word meaning ``all knowing'' and whose board includes a former deputy director of the NSA. Narus sells software that can monitor huge volumes of Internet traffic and zero in on a particular computer, Internet address or person. Narus' software -- able to scan 10 billion bits of data per second for network anomalies, viruses or other malicious code -- can also be used to spot the e-mails and phone calls of terrorism suspects. In addition, Narus can re-create from the captured data packets a suspect's online activities, including e-mails, Web pages and Internet phone calls. While Narus' main clients are giant telecoms, the company's software was also allegedly used by the NSA in a massive snooping operation, according to a class-action lawsuit on behalf of AT&T customers filed in San Francisco by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group. The lawsuit alleges that AT&T allowed the NSA to tap into millions of telephone and Internet communications redirected to a ``secret room'' at an AT&T facility in San Francisco. Once a system such as Narus captures communications, that information can be mined in multiple ways. Law enforcement officials could analyze text traffic for suspicious patterns using software made by Attensity of Palo Alto. The majority of Attensity's customers are government agencies, including the NSA and Homeland Security, said the firm's Chief Executive Craig Norris. ``You don't even have to know what it is you're searching for,'' said Norris. ``But you'll know it once you find it.'' For example, ``if a terrorist is planning a bombing, they might say `Let's have a barbecue,' '' said Norris. ``The software can detect if the word `barbecue' is being used more often than usual.'' Chatter on ailments Currently, there's increased Web chatter about medical ailments in the Middle East, and some speculate it may be tied to insurgent activity, said Attensity executives. Just the phone logs of who called whom, when and for how long can yield clues and sometimes answers. Data mining can create a model for detecting the calling patterns of a terrorist cell that is planning an attack. If the government identifies just one telephone number to target, a phone tree of potential terrorists and their associates can be established. Computers can analyze that network to determine an organizational structure: who's in charge, and who's taking orders from whom. If telephone conversations are recorded, CallMiner of Fort Myers, Fla., claims its software can convert audio phone calls into text that can be mined. Initially developed for call centers that service customers over the phone, its tools also analyze recordings by looking at characteristics such as word stress, tempo and pauses to try to determine a caller's intent. CallMiner's software is used by companies in the airline, banking and cable industries to sift through thousands of hours of recorded conversations with customers to identify problems or trends with their products. The software is also used by government agencies, though the NSA is not a customer, said co-founder Cliff LaCoursiere. He said executives at the company don't know how government employees use the software because the CIA's In-Q-Tel, which provided CallMiner with funding, markets and licenses the software to government entities on its own. One thing that concerns privacy advocates is that data mining is far from perfect and can produce false positives that might turn innocent Americans into suspects. ``In reality, the data is quite noisy,'' said Artur Dubrawski, director of the Auton Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, which specializes in data mining. ``The results are a probability that something is true, it's not definite. There's always a risk of getting it wrong.'' False positives in marketing data do little harm. But applying mathematical algorithms to help catch terrorists makes at least one executive of a data-mining firm nervous. ``I'm scared,'' said Lincoln Evans-Beauchamp, chief executive of EWA Systems in Palo Alto. ``You start believing in the technology.'' ``For every one terrorist you find, you'll find another 1,000 and label them potential terrorists for horrendous consequences,'' he said. ---------------------------------------------------
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