WASHINGTON – The new head of the Transportation Security Administration say he’s giving 10,000 of the agency’s employees access to secret intelligence information to better enable them to detect threats and stop terrorists.
To better track criminals, U.S. wants to be able to wiretap online communications.
It is just a technical matter, the Obama administration says: We just need to make a slight change in a law to make clear that we have the right to see the names of anyone’s e-mail correspondents and their Web browsing history without the messy complication of asking a judge for permission.
It is far more than a technical change. The administration’s request, reported Thursday in The Washington Post, is an unnecessary and disappointing step backward toward more intrusive surveillance from a president who promised something very different during the 2008 campaign.
The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both backing a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.
The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents — both present and still-to-come. In a white paper, the company says its temporal analytics engine “goes beyond search” by “looking at the ‘invisible links’ between documents that talk about the same, or related, entities and events.”
The idea is to figure out for each incident who was involved, where it happened and when it might go down. Recorded Future then plots that chatter, showing online “momentum” for any given event.
Attorney speculates data could include Facebook friend requests
The White House has asked Congress to make it possible for the FBI to demand that Internet service providers turn over customers’ records in cases involving terrorism or other intelligence issues without first obtaining a court order.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act currently states that companies are required to provide basic subscriber data to the FBI, but lists only the four kinds of information that might be found on phone bills — customer’s name, address, length of service, and toll billing records.
In 2008, the Justice Department ruled that those four categories were “exhaustive,” making some companies reluctant to provide any additional information. The proposed amendment would add the phrase “electronic communication transactional records” to the list in order to include the recipients of emails and when they were sent and received — though not their content. It might also cover web browsing history.
When historians look back on the period between 2001 and 2011, they will be amazed that a nation that professed to hate bureaucracy produced so much of it.
During the first part of this period, the Republicans were in control. They expanded a vast national security bureaucracy. In their series in The Washington Post, Dana Priest and William M. Arkin detail the size of this apparatus. More than 1,200 government agencies and 1,900 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence programs at around 10,000 sites across the country. An estimated 854,000 people have top-secret security clearance. These analysts produce 50,000 reports a year — a flow of paper so great that many are completely ignored.
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