SIGINT

“they won’t let me on the plane, cuz i’m the bomb.” – sinfest

i hate election years. during an election year, politicians focus all their energy trying to simplify complex issues down to a field so narrow they can use it to make you afraid. or maybe it’s so narrow that they can understand it. this week it’s ‘government surveillance’. the reason that the idea that the NSA has access to the list of numbers they call sends so many lefties into a spastic frenzy is because the fundamentally believe that there are secrets. in reality, where i live, the NSA didn’t get that information by placing a pen register on their phone, and as such did not violate the ECPA. it got the information from the phone company. or from your insurance company. or from your local shopping center.

you give this information up when you sign the paperwork, or sign up for the program, or participate in the survey. you are paid for your information with reliable service and discounts on things you want to buy. deciding it’s rape in the morning doesn’t cut it. i don’t trust the government – i hate the government. at heart, i am an anarchist. however, i know that the government is not going to use this information to pinpoint people that disagree with it, or to develop intelligence on cadres of homosexuals, or to figure out who’s called greenpeace and who hasn’t. why? because there’s no need, and it can’t do anything with the information. i know a lot of you have bought into the idea that we’re some kind of fascist state now after the patriot act, but you’re just buying to thefear mongering and paranoia rampant on the websites of far too many rich kids with nothing better to do. but it’s simply not cost-effective to suppress any kind of civil dissidence. there are just too many people out there with too many differing and often stupid belief systems, and tracking them all would take up too much bandwidth. in terms of economics, there’s no incentive. there’s nothing to gain. there are too few idealists in this country willing to risk injury to do anything more than get on cnn. changing minds is much harder than getting on cnn. the people who are most afraid are those who are most ‘progressive’, and as such are the least likely to have guns, explosives, or any motivation to take action more violent that marching with a sign. the u.s. government isn’t afraid of people with signs, who’d rather be at a wine-tasting somewhere. heck, this administration has passed up too much opportunity to pursue actual dissidence or even treason and hasn’t done it, but because of the narrow blinders most people wear, only seeking out the kind of news they want to hear, they never realize it. ignorance is, indeed, bliss.

just understand this: ignorance doesn’t make you powerful. it makes you weak.

now, back to privacy: you don’t have any. you are not guaranteed any definitive level of privacy at all. what does ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ mean? what does ‘reasonable’ mean to you, versus what does it mean to me? does it mean that domestic citizens can make phone calls without eavesdropping? sure. are foreign nationals granted the same rights? no. do both parties of a phone call have to be warranted in order to wiretap? no. so in the foreign eavesdropping bit, the domestic caller is not being surveilled, and as such is only a bystander, much as a mobster’s mother might be, should mobsters call their mothers. even if it’s not true, it’s a perfectly valid argument that could be made in a society as litigious as this one. it is an argument that can be won in the eyes of this supreme court.

the domestic network analysis thing: does ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ extend to information you give up willingly? no. you can place a phone call reliably and cheaply because the fcc regulates communications. you can call customers of other phone companies because of the fcc. when you call, you willingly give up your information to the phone company: you are asking them to connect you to whomever it is you are calling. they do so, and now they have a record of a call. you are not married to the phone company, they are not your priest, your doctor, or your psychotherapist, and as such, you do not have any expectation of privacy granted you by law. when the phone company decides to turn over your calling list to uncle sam on request, your choices are ‘suck it up and change phone companies’ if you happen to live in a part of the country where that’s possible, or ‘stop making calls’.

at the end of the day, you don’t have the right to use the telephone: the telephone is a privilege that you participate in out of convenience. in no way is it ‘essential liberty’. consider the highway – when you climb into your car, you are accepting the risks associated with doing so. driving and being on the highway with other drivers is dangerous. we hope that everyone will follow the rules and behave, but we also, as thinking people, have to accept that not everyone will. in this case, we might get hurt. it is a risk we take for convenience, so that we don’t have to walk everywhere, or accept higher taxes to finance public transit. the phone saves us the delay of postage, or the cost of acquiring knowledge related to PK for email, or the travel expenses to hold a face-to-face. it is a convenience.

the simple truth is this: we do not live in a world anymore where the definition of privacy can be extended indefinitely. if you want to live in a country that grants you greater privacy, by all means, there’s the door. move there. there are just as many people, if not more, that are dissatisfied with this administration because it has not been ruthless enough, as there are who feel that the rights of the individual to have phone sex without an NSA guy chuckling at them is more vital than national security. i am tired of hearing about money we send to palestine to help out people who want to blow up israel, when there are more people in my own state, most of which are poor, all of which could use the money, none of which are backward militant fanatic idiots. wait, let me take that last part back. none of which are going to blow anything up. i am tired of hearing about the rights you think you have, the little ways in which you want to insulate yourself from the world and the government and stick your head in the sand.

don’t be afraid of the government. be afraid of the people who’ve already said they want to kill you. protect yourself against them, not against the organization who’s trying to keep your ungrateful ass from being blown to pieces while you sit in a coffee shop.

in case you’re curious about how network analysis (which is what we’re talking about, as a subset of traffic analysis) can be used to gather intelligence, here are a couple of examples:

two known cell members, bob and joe have been identified (say, through the international terrorist surveillance program). they have phones. by analyzing who they call, and who is calling them, they can take the intersection of these lists and get a likely list of other cell members. chains of command can be established. now there are more people to watch, who will likely be presented as candidates for actual wiretaps to a judge in short order. in this way, our intelligence on domestic spies and enemies of the state can be identified through network analysis. without network analysis information at the ready, there’s a time delay between the identification of these people and the possibility identification of their co-conspirators.

a more basic traffic analysis example. under the patriot act, agents can place surveillance devices in the homes of terror suspects without their knowledge. (and, without a warrant, actually.) when are the suspects home? check the phone record. if there is a consistent period during which no calls are issued for the house, it is likely that they are elsewhere during those hours on a regular basis. this saves time and money.

so currently, the msm is reporting on this. they’re gushing over ahmadinejad’s letter to bush and failing to report that a formal call to islam (or da’wa) is the first step under sharia in a formal declaration of war. they’re talking about starving palestinians, who are starving because they don’t actually produce anything and voted to have a terrorist state, and not talking about living conditions in appalachia, which’ve been just as bad for over a century. they rave about high oil prices and blame the oil companies, but fail to point out that the reason we haven’t drilled in anwr or offshore, and haven’t built any new refineries is because of the resistance of left-leaning senators and representatives, all the while taking those same senators’ and representatives’ issues and plastering them all over tv and radio in order to skew the election toward those who are the most likely to let their parent companies put tits on the tv.

and we still have a plurality voting system, despite the availability of good alternatives.

all marvelously transparent. all incredibly stupid. i hate election years. this kind of bullshit is wasting the time of our government. it is election-year hoodwinking of the populace, and you are falling for it.

that’s it, i’m done.