NSA Director Keith Alexander
(Credit:
Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Facebook, Google, and other tech firms apparently aren't the only
ones who've been fascinated by the potential of "social graphs" -- maps
of people's social connections. The NSA has reportedly been tapping its
giant repositories of phone and e-mail data to create complex diagrams
of some Americans' interactions, including lists of associates and
travel companions; location info; and other personal data.
The US National Security Agency has, The New York Times reports,
been creating such graphs since 2010, using setups like the "Enterprise
Knowledge System" -- which, according to a leaked document referenced
by the Times, is designed to "rapidly discover and correlate complex
relationships and patterns across diverse data sources on a massive
scale."
Another document -- these being the latest to surface from the cache
provided to journalists by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden -- is
titled "Better Person Centric Analysis." It discusses 94 "entity types,"
such as phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and IP addresses, that are
trawled by the NSA using queries like "travelsWith, hasFather,
sentForumMessage, employs" to create "community of interest" profiles.
Data is also culled from other sources, such as passenger manifests,
voter registration rolls, tax info, GPS location data, bank codes,
insurance information, and even Facebook profiles, the Times reports.
This latest revelation about the NSA's practices comes as critics worry about the secretive agency abusing its surveillance powers and as Congress ponders curtailing the agency's programs.
The intention of the NSA social graphs, according to a 2011 agency
memo quoted by the Times, is to "discover and track" connections between
foreign intelligence targets and Americans. The effort has been
facilitated by a policy change at the agency -- made in secret -- that's
allowed analysts there to scan communications metadata and create
social graphs "without," the memo says, "having to check foreigness" of
every phone number, e-mail address, or other identifier that comes up.
The agency had previously required such verification to protect the
privacy of American citizens, but had, the Times says, been frustrated
by how that restriction slowed or stopped its investigations of various
contact chains.
Metadata includes things like location info regarding a given phone
number; what calls have been placed from that number and when; and how
long the calls have lasted. It doesn't include the actual content of
calls (or e-mails), though some have pointed out that it can reveal a significant amount of personal information.
An agency spokeswoman told the Times that the policy change was based
on a Supreme Court ruling from 1979 -- Smith v. Maryland -- which the
Justice Department and others maintain means that individuals don't have an expectation of privacy in the phone numbers they call. Still others, however, say the case is not only outdated but not exactly relevant either.
NSA officials wouldn't say how many Americans have been swept up in
the social graph effort or which phone and e-mail databases are being
used, the Times reports. They did say, however, that the effort does not
involve the database of domestic call records that was revealed by
Snowden's leaked documents back in June.
An NSA spokeswoman told the Times in regard to the social graph
effort: "All data queries must include a foreign intelligence
justification, period" and that "all of NSA's work has a foreign
intelligence purpose. Our activities are centered on counterterrorism,
counterproliferation, and cybersecurity."
The idea of social graphs -- though of a markedly different type --
has also seized the imagination of Internet developers. In 2010,
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company's "Open Graph"
initiative at the F8 conference. At that time, Facebook Director of
Platform Product Bret Taylor said, "now for the first time, the likes
and interests of my Facebook profile link to places that are not
Facebook.com...My identity is not just defined by things on Facebook,
it's defined by things all over the Web."
It seems the idea of an uberweb of connections appealed to people in other fields as well.
Read the Times piece here.
sumber : cnet.com
