Another Mathematician Responds to the NSA Mass Surveillance

Having already discussed at length the reaction of a former NSA mathematician, Keith Devlin of Stanford University - appearing in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (Vol. 61, No. 6, p. 624)-  to the Edward Snowden leaks on NSA overreach, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/07/stanford-mathematician-calls-out-nsa-on.html

It is interesting to examine another, this one appearing in Notices of the American Mathematical Society (Vol. 61, No. 8, p. 902.) The author, William Binney, is a former NSA Technical Director, now retired.   After giving his considerable background, including co-founder of the Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (SARC), he notes that what made it possible to "smartly select data" was none other than "building relationships between entities".

In other words, the persistent protection of sound professional relationships was the cornerstone to smart collection and storage of data - ensuring there was no problem of maximum overload - and hence - adding more and more 'hay' to find the proverbial "needle in the haystack".

What is most telling, are Binney's takes on what's going on now with the indiscriminate NSA surveillance as revealed by whistle blower Ed Snowden. He makes specific reference to the formidable technological power now at the hands of the NSA as he writes (p. 903):

"Unfortunately, all this power to capture data, graph social networks, and index collected data to the relationships in the graph was directed initially inward, toward U.S. citizens. This automatically produced a profile of the activity of everyone. This profile was available on request from analysts. Also in the process, the NSA removed the privacy protections for U.S. citizens and decided to collect and store as much data as it could ingest. No one has privacy from the government anymore,

I, of course, objected, as in my mind these actions were at a minimum, a violation of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments to our Constitution."

And, of course, he's absolutely correct as can be ascertained by anyone who reads the words of the referenced amendments. Prof. Binney clearly has since he explains where each violation occurs, e.g.

First Amendment:

This is violated because "the graphing of social networks (enhanced by other knowledge bases) would show the people you are associated with. The First Amendment says you have the right to peaceably assemble, and the Supreme Court has held (in NAACP vs. Alabama) that the government does not have the right to know with whom you are assembling.

Fourth Amendment:

"The collection of your email, chatter and phone calls (recorded or transcribed) is a violation of the Fourth Amendment right to be secure in you affairs."

One can validate this take simply by reading the statement of the 4th amendment itself:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

What we see then is that the NSA mass surveillance, mass warrants that Ed Snowden revealed, discloses a rejection not only of citizens’ fundamental right to privacy but any right to be secure in one’s person, papers, effects.

Fifth Amendment:

"Using content data to search for criminal activity can also be a violation of the Fifth Amendment, which gives the right not to be a witness against yourself. An example of this is the 'parallel construction' techniques used by the FBI and the DEA's Special Operations Division, to find evidence to submit in court proceedings when they use data collected by the NSA."

Thus does Prof. Binney make a sound case of how the Constitution is being violated. He also has words for those who have the naïve impression all this NSA data grabbing is innocuous:

"Some have claimed the NSA collection is innocuous  because for those who are not terrorist suspects or associates, the NSA collects only metadata- such as phone numbers, the date, time and duration of calls. Evidence that this claim is untrue can be found, for example, in the testimony of two NSA transcribers who worked at Fort Gordon in Georgia: Adrienne Kinne and David Murfee Falk, They have testified that after the invasion of Iraq, they transcribed in full, calls made by U.S. citizens in the Green Zone- members of the military, NGOs, journalists etc.  Kinne and Murfee were disturbed at having to transcribe these intimate, personal conversations between family members. This transcribing was done without warrant and thereby violated both USSID -18 and FISA - and of course, the Constitution."


He doesn't mention that subsequently, a rat-faced bunch of congressional weasels ok'd the warrantless wiretapping, and thereby saved them the trouble of prosecuting the Bushies who initiated it. The same congress then made the unlawful, lawful in a re-interpreted FISA law - which most of us 4th amendment "zealots" take as bogus.

Sad, but if this doesn't get every citizen off his or her butt and screaming, I don't know what will.

Stanford Mathematician Calls Out NSA on "Betrayal of Trust"

After having found out in the past week (thanks to a WaPo investigation) that nine of ten ordinary internet account holders were targets of the NSA mass surveillance,  but not the intended surveillance targets,  has justifiably amped up criticism of the super secret agency. Even before this latest incident, voices (including the authors of the Patriot Act). have called out for the NSA to back off and for congress to do something about the overreach.

One of the best recent articles - though not in the mainstream media - appeared in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (Vol. 61, No. 6, p. 624). Entitled 'The NSA: A Betrayal of Trust - by Keith Devlin of Stanford University - it basically summarized in an articulate and coherent manner why so many of us object to the mass collection called "data mining".  Thus, in his piece, Devlin concentrates on the  indiscriminate  vacuuming up of personal information that Edward Snowden released.

Devlin's own background entailed examining the problem of data mining in depth and whether dragnet surveillance that required  "mass" warrants was really effective and justified. Thus, from early 2002 to 2006, he worked on a Defense Department research project called NIMD (Novel Intelligence from Massive Data, e.g.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Novel_Intelligence_from_Massive_Data

funded by the Advanced Research and Development agency.

Devlin undertook this work under a contract to Veridian Inc. and the project was non-classified (he never sought or had security clearance - but his group was asked not to make public statements about its involvement. He acknowledged at the time he was "happy to go along with it".

Which brings us to why he's now gone into print. According to Devlin (ibid.):

"The only reason I am putting these words down now is the feeling of intense betrayal I suffered when I learned that my government and the leadership of my intelligence community took the work I and others did over many years with a genuine desire to prevent another 9/11 attack, and subverted it in ways that run totally counter to the founding principles of the United States, that cause huge harm to the U.S. economy, and that moreover almost certainly weaken our ability to defend ourselves"

(Devlin goes on to emphasize that "what my words express below is my considered and informed opinion that I never had, nor do I now have, any information beyond what is publicly available." Which is a justified aside to make, given how Obama & Co. have used the 1917  "Espionage Act" against those revealing anything)

Leaving out all the details I will just touch on several of Devlin's most important points and findings:

- The "significant human part" of the decision chain tends to be totally overlooked when intelligence leaders and politicians talk in glowing terms about the massive data processing of huge trawls of information.

- Data mining systems don't identify and take out terrorist groups, people do. And those people require not only accurate information but sufficient meta-information to have confidence in any decision that make. ('Meta-information' is information concerning the quality of the information -or lack thereof)

- The bigger you make the dataset, the wider the information trawl, the more unlikely it will lead to an effective counter measure. (Thus, not only did NIMD fail to meet its goal, but as the data collection grew the more inaccessible the goal became.)

- The methods and tools developed via NIMD could be of real benefit if used in a highly targeted way.  Hence the real NIMD message: Use of the search and analysis methods should be narrow and deep.

- The best way to identify the high likelihood targets is via HUMINT (human intelligence). This is not only the most effective way known but "it does not require breaking laws and trampling on the U.S. Constitution. You get a court order and proceed lawfully, it's supposed to be the American way."

The last is a point I've echoed in multiple blog posts since July last year, to the point it's damned near a refrain. The point is what the NSA has now done, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2014/07/is-there-no-one-prepared-to-collar-nsa.html

has veered into totally Un-American ways, more emblematic of what the Gestapo used during the brief reign of the Third Reich. The American way, by contrast, respects the rights of citizens enshrined in the founding document - the Constitution and specifically, the Bill of Rights.  It doesn't "go rogue" because technology allows facile snatching of data and personal info. Oh, and it doesn't go ape shit nuts and hyper-fascist because a true patriot called the misbegotten methods used out via file release to selected media.

Devlin's most telling statement echoes those I have also repeatedly made, in regard to the extend to which freedom should be compromised for a temporary security:

"Personally, I would not trade freedom in order to prevent terrorist attacks, even if they were more frequent than the current de facto frequency of every ten years or so. If you do that, the terrorists have won."

Indeed, because the 'bad guys' have manipulated the so-called "protectors" to do to us what they could not: gut our civil liberties and make a mockery of American freedom and rights aspirations. This is exactly why the contest between security and liberty must err on the side of the latter, no matter what. NO matter if ISIS poses a big threat to us, or al Qaeda in Yemen comes back strong, or Iran gets a new bomb...or whatever. All of those threats are insignificant to the preservation of American founding principles.

Once we allow the spooks to gut everything, snatch everything they want with bogus warrants under a bogus FISA law,  we will cease to be the nation founded on the Constitution and the one my ancestor Conrad Brumbaugh fought for. We become instead a fascist mutation.

Devlin leaves his most stinging remark for last:

"As things currently stand, I would not collaborate further with any of the U.S. intelligence services. They have betrayed all of us who were glad to do what we could for the benefit of the free world and have used our work to trample over the Fourth Amendment, to do immense harm to U.S. economic competitiveness, to weaken the Internet on which modern society depends, and to expose us to increased danger from our enemies.

I urge all my fellow citizens to make a similar stand."

 Alas, his final statement requires we stand up as truly free citizens, and reject the 'security blankets' offered us by the security state. "Live free or die" - the motto of one of our states (I believe New Hampshire) - should be our personal motto too!