Servers. Photograph by Torkild Retvedt





“Foreignness” is binary. You are either inside the territorial United States or you are not. Due to the complexities of how communications traffic is routed from server to server to server, some packets of information have a very high degree of location certainly and some have a very low degree. The point is that the NSA has set the bar quite low.  Technology can never give us 100 percent, or even 80 percent, certainty that only people outside the US are being monitored.

And what if you want to know whether a person is a terrorist? One man’s terrorist may be another man’s nuisance. In the United Kingdom terrorist acts are those which are “designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system.” Although spammers are life forms somewhere between cockroaches and skunks, they are not terrorists. But under UK law, they very well could be.

At some point, additional filtering is done based on content. For computers, analyzing human speech and making decisions is still problematic. For those of you with an iPhone, you know full well the accuracy of Siri.

Beyond just problems with speech recognition, there are certain nuances and context that are simply unavailable to a computer (and in cases, to a human examiner).  For instance, in almost every marriage a frustrated spouse has declared “I’m going to kill you!”  In few cases – very, very few — this is meant literally. But a computer cannot discern whether these words should be taken literally.

Because of these complications, suspicious communications need to be examined by a human analyst. That is why thousands of innocent domestic communications have been monitored by the NSA. In fact, the incidence of privacy violations has actually increased because of Big Data.




Furthermore, what if the bad guys manipulate the algorithms? In the intelligence world, there is a sub-discipline of counter-intelligence. Part of this involves the use of deception so that an adversary will believe things that are not true and will make bad decisions based on bad information.

Data-mining may sound like an obscure technology. But we take advantage of highly sophisticated public data-mining technology every time we use a search engine. Search engines work by scanning the entire internet so that when a consumer wants to find web pages related to dinosaurs, they see only web pages related to dinosaurs.



An entire industry has developed around manipulating search engine — search engine optimization (SEO). Most SEO is legitimate marketing – “white hat SEO”. But its nasty little brother, “black-hat SEO”, uses similar techniques to infect computers with malicious software or to tempt web surfers into buying pornography.


The NSA monitors metadata for phone calls (the source and destination and the length of call). But it isn’t difficult to poison that well. Hackers in the 80s would routinely tap phones lines to make “free phone calls”. A device to do this is called a beige box and designs are freely available on the internet.

The equivalent nowadays is cell phone “cloning”. This is far more difficult, but it is possible. A recent vulnerability may have exposed 750 million cell phone users to just this kind of attack.  In other words, guys in black hats can log fake phone calls on your cell phone.


As for fake emails to direct intelligence interest at an innocent victim, this is a trivial task for a black-hat programmer (it’s called email spoofing). We see the results every day as the avalanche of spam in our inboxes.  Even a novice computer user can spoof an email. Imagine what would happen if you were to send spoofed emails mentioning bombs, jihad and assassination in the name of a friend. A practical joke could land your friend (or, more likely, ex-friend) in the calaboose for a few days until the intelligence services were sure that he was innocent.



Written by John Bambenek


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MercatorNet examines current news and events and how they impact on human dignity. This page is where you can express your opinions and exchange ideas on these issues.

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