Network Theory & Able Danger

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Patrick Radden Keefe writes in this Sunday’s NYT’s about some of the technology that went into Able Danger and how useful it can be. Of course the fact this is in the New York Times you had to know they would include the usual hyperbole about the NSA wiretaps:

Recent debates about the National Security Agency’s warrantless-eavesdropping program have produced two very different pictures of the operation. Whereas administration officials describe a carefully aimed “terrorist surveillance program,” press reports depict a pervasive electronic net ensnaring thousands of innocent people and few actual terrorists.

Yeah, the program targeted 30+ some odd people….thousands my ass. You see how they attempt to wrap the wiretap program with the program’s the NSA have done for quite some time, put in place by Bush’s predecessor.

During the last decade, mathematicians, physicists and sociologists have advanced the scientific study of networks, identifying surprising commonalities among the ways airlines route their flights, people interact at cocktail parties and crickets synchronize their chirps. In the increasingly popular language of network theory, individuals are “nodes,” and relationships and interactions form the “links” binding them together; by mapping those connections, network scientists try to expose patterns that might not otherwise be apparent. Researchers are applying newly devised algorithms to vast databases ? one academic team recently examined the e-mail traffic of 43,000 people at a large university and mapped their social ties. Given the difficulty of identifying elusive terror cells, it was only a matter of time before this new science was discovered by America’s spies.

In its simplest form, network theory is about connecting the dots. Stanley Milgram’s finding that any two Americans are connected by a mere six intermediaries ? or “degrees of separation” ? is one of the animating ideas behind the science of networks; the Notre Dame physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi studied one obvious network ? the Internet ? and found that any two unrelated Web pages are separated by only 19 links. After Sept. 11, Valdis Krebs, a Cleveland consultant who produces social network “maps” for corporate and nonprofit clients, decided to map the hijackers. He started with two of the plotters, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, and, using press accounts, produced a chart of the interconnections ? shared addresses, telephone numbers, even frequent-flier numbers ? within the group. All of the 19 hijackers were tied to one another by just a few links, and a disproportionate number of links converged on the leader, Mohamed Atta. Shortly after posting his map online, Krebs was invited to Washington to brief intelligence contractors.

Announced in 2002, Adm. John Poindexter’s controversial Total Information Awareness program was an early effort to mine large volumes of data for hidden connections. But even before 9/11, an Army project called Able Danger sought to map Al Qaeda by “identifying linkages and patterns in large volumes of data,” and may have succeeded in identifying Atta as a suspect. As if to underline the project’s social-network principles, Able Danger analysts called it “the Kevin Bacon game.”

Given that the N.S.A. intercepts some 650 million communications worldwide every day, it’s not surprising that its analysts focus on a question well suited to network theory: whom should we listen to in the first place? Russell Tice, a former N.S.A. employee who worked on highly classified Special Access Programs, says that analysts start with a suspect and “spider-web” outward, looking at everyone he contacts, and everyone those people contact, until the list includes thousands of names. Officials familiar with the program have said that before individuals are actually wiretapped, computers sort through flows of metadata ? information about who is contacting whom by phone or e-mail. An unclassified National Science Foundation report says that one tool analysts use to sort through all that data is link analysis.

The use of such network-based analysis may explain the administration’s decision, shortly after 9/11, to circumvent the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court grants warrants on a case-by-case basis, authorizing comprehensive surveillance of specific individuals. The N.S.A. program, which enjoys backdoor access to America’s major communications switches, appears to do just the opposite: the surveillance is typically much less intrusive than what a FISA warrant would permit, but it involves vast numbers of people.

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Overall an interesting article about some of the nuts and bolts that go into the program, if you can wade through the obvious bias. Hopefully the next edition of Able Danger doesn’t get shut down because a few lawyers get a little nervous.