The NSA is Looking for "Anomalies"

COMMENTS

I was involved in this kind of work as an analyst when I was in the Army 40 years ago. I can’t even conceive of what the types of information and the technology used to get it must be like today.

The government must protect it’s citizens. For virtually as long as there have been telegraph, telephone or radio communications, all governments have to a greater or lesser degree sought to discover what their enemies (and even their friends were up to).

Today we’re engaged in a differnt kind of conflict where the enemy isn’t using millions of soldiers organized into complex formations using fixed and mobile command posts.

It might be 25 people whose telphone numbers are not listed in the Manhattan telephone directory.

Do you want your government to protect you?

Then what they probably are doing is throwing out a net and grabbing billions of messages and phone calls daily and electronically sorting them based upon patterns that they have discovered in the past. Those patterns based on location, based on language, based on time of day, based on time of year, based on length of message and probably thousands of other patterns that are used in the hopes that they can learn information that will help to prevent the next 911 type attack.

Nobody is sitting and listening to orders for birthday cakes, transactions with bookies, romantic assignations among adulturous spouses and the like. There is too much at stake and not enough people to do it if they wanted to.

Even when they have filtered all the billions of items, daily they end up with many thousands of items to analyze, translate and then categorize and communicate to the appropriate parties. An almost impossible task. But there is no other option.

Do you really think a native born American can sneak into Pakistan or Afghanistan and infiltrate bin Laden’s headquarters? Not gonna happen. Not even a Pakistani unknown to them could do that.

If we can’t talk or listen to them in person, and we can’t mind read, then doing it remotely through electronics is the only method left.

And since we generally don’t know what we are looking for until we see it, everything has to be filtered, looking for one of the intelligence community’s favorite words, “anomalies”, something out of the ordinary.

Posted by Ray from MN on 05/13/06 at 06:03 PM