Did NSA Reject Legal Surveillance Technology?

May 18, 2006

An interesting article appeared from The Baltimore Sun today, citing sources who say that the National Security Agency developed and rejected a technology during the late-1990s that would have done a better job sifting phone data and that would have done so in a way that would not have violated U.S. citizens' privacy -- see "NSA rejected system that sifted phone data legally."

The release of this information seems timed to embarrass Michael V. Hayden, Pres. Bush's nominee for CIA director, facing Senate confirmation hearings today. Hayden was head of the NSA at the time the alternative technology, ThinThread, was rejected in favor of the supposedly less-rigorous program that is now generating criticism.

The Sun says the rejected ThinThread technology would have:

-- Used more-sophisticated methods of sorting through massive phone and e-mail data to identify suspect communications.
-- Identified U.S. phone numbers and other communications data and encrypted them to ensure caller privacy.
-- Employed an automated auditing system to monitor how analysts handled the information, in order to prevent misuse and improve efficiency.
-- Analyzed the data to identify relationships between callers and chronicle their contacts. Only when evidence of a potential threat had been developed would analysts be able to request decryption of the records

From news reports today it looks to me as if Hayden wishes everybody would just stop talking about all this and leave the intelligence agencies alone to do their jobs -- see "Hayden Defends Legality of NSA Surveillance" on Fox News, which quotes Hayden as saying that "the intelligence community in general 'has too much become the football of American political discourse. CIA needs to get out of the news as source or subject and focus on protecting the American people by acquiring secrets' from U.S. enemies."

It does seem likely that all this public attention must be inhibiting the ability of U.S. intelligence organizations to do their jobs. And correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't remember hearing specific reports of American citizens being harassed, unfairly targeted or mistreated as a result of the NSA surveillance. But of course the potential is there, and that I guess is the point.

American society demands a lot of transparency and accountability on the part of its government, and the demand for accountability is in part in response to the abuses of the past -- the FBI's machinations against Martin Luther King come to mind, for example.

It brings to mind a problem I've thought of in connection with business ethics. Often business interests complain about government regulation, and about the interference of consumer and environmental advocates and other special interest groups. But it seems to me that if industries did a better job of self-regulation, they would be less likely to face a hue and cry from the public, along with restrictive legislation.

The same might be true of security services and other agencies of government. It's just a thought.

AB -- 5/18/06