The NSA Minefield

It all seems so simple: If you're innocent, why should you worry if the NSA knows who you talk to on the phone?

Back in the sixties I was lucky to work for Ernie Besig, at the ACLU Northern California office. Green as a cucumber, I told him I was really appalled at the ACLU's position that American Nazis should be allowed to promote their filthy anti-semitism with impunity. (See the 1934 ACLU statement, Shall We Defend Free Speech for Nazis in America?) Indeed, in 1977 and 1978 the ACLU did actively intercede on behalf of the Nazis when the village of Skokie, Illinois — a majority-Jewish community, including many Holocaust survivors — sought to prevent them from marching through town in fear of what outrage might bring.

Ernie turned it into a no-brainer for me: If we can deny the Nazis' the right to speak or march, then in the future someone will be able to deny those rights to us.

And so it is with collecting telephone call information: Bush and his NSA can assert, even perhaps truthfully, that they have no intention of violating the privacy of any one of us non-al Qaeda types, that our liberties will be "fiercely" protected. But if we allow it this time, how will we be able to stop it the next time, when some other President decides to listen in?

And that's not all there is to worry about. In a thorough and lucid description of just how data mining works, Matthew Stannard, writing for the SF Chronicle, includes this warning by security technologist Bruce Schneier:

But the problem with applying data mining techniques to terrorism, Schneier argued, is that terrorism is so rare, and the databases being mined are so large, that false positives are inevitable and often more common than truly accurate results.

And unlike using data mining to spot credit card fraud, where at most a false positive triggers a worried call from Visa to a cardholder and perhaps a temporary suspension of the card's use, a false positive in a terror investigation can put an innocent person in jail, he said.

How could a such a false positive happen? Well, here's one way:

Six degrees of separation is the theory that anyone on earth can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries. The theory was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy in a short story called Chains. The concept is based on the idea that the number of acquaintances grows exponentially with the number of links in the chain, and so only a small number of links is required for the set of acquaintances to become the whole human population.

Got friends? Do they have friends? Who do those friends know? Who do friends of friends of those friends talk to?

This can't be allowed.