A Blogblast from the Past

I see that the issue of recording telephone call patterns is back in the news. Just what was the Bush administration's eavesdropping plan anyway? And who authorized or didn't authorize it? A year ago in May I wrote a series of blogitems on the subject to discuss the government's scheme, and came to a potentially startling conclusion. What are they up to? Is it legal? What is the program really all about? Is it more than it seems or is even suspected? I'm pleased to note that other than one suspicious "survey" telephone call shortly thereafter, I don't seem to have suffered any repercussions from publishing these items, so maybe it's just my usual goofy musings. Or some weird conspiracy theory. Or, possibly, entirely accurate. Here's an opportunity for thousands of new millireaders who understandably haven't had the patience to return to May 2006 to ignore my theory.

Part I, in which I explain a bit about "traffic analysis."

Part II, in which I present a hypothesis and a few large, but not that large, numbers.

Part III, in which I pretend to check my own sanity and, just possibly, ethics.

Astronomy, Geology, What's the Difference?

Not quite a year ago, an entirely different and even more public controversy erupted: Is Pluto a planet? My thoughts on this subject inevitably turned to this notion: Astronomers really should be required to at least have licenses to practice their trade. You can read here how I came to that conclusion.

And there the matter would have rested, except I just read an article about "dowsers" or "witchers" and how they are employed to discover water so that wells can be dug. It seems that "While 'low-tech' witching isn't illegal a few witchers who purport to be scientists and use high-tech equipment such as radar to supplement their witching are violating a 1968 law that bans practicing geology without a license."

Clearly the astronomers, who also use high-tech equipment, have a more powerful lobby.

Traffic Analysis - Part III

Well now I've done it! I've exposed a secret government plot to record our telephone calls, expose our crimes and peccadilloes, and build a wall around the USA not just to keep them out, but to keep us in. Right. And I have some great photos of the aliens in the freezer at Area 51 not to mention the magnetic vortex generator at Wright-Pat. In fact, I have little patience with and even less belief in "conspiracy theories." They make fine entertainment when embodied in fiction, but are quite tedious when promulgated by axe-grinding, irrational bozeaux with vestigial critical faculties and even less of a sense of humor. To avoid falling into this category, let me undertake some self criticism.

What parts of the preceding two items on traffic analysis are true?
Unlike my notion of using nuclear waste to heat your pool, which I revealed to be satire, I don't think there's anything in this series that conclusively isn't true. I have no pipeline into our national security apparat, have nobody to ask, and would be extremely unlikely to receive an answer if I did. So let's try assessing this ourselves:

Q: Is it even possible for NSA to get access to all this telephone data?
A: Of course. This is the organization that, along with the US Navy, tapped a Russian underwater telephone cable. If they did that a decade or more ago, how hard can it be to get data from telephone company facilities in our own country?

Q: How certain are you of just how much data has to be stored?
A: Having made up the numbers, I'd have to give them pretty wide margins. Even so, I'd be surprised if I was off by more than an order of magnitude. That may seem like a lot, but it isn't - storage capabilities typically increase by that much in a couple of years.

Q: Are you really concerned that someone named Hayden was nominated as DCI, (and confirmed since you started publishing these blogitems)?
A: Not really. Although DIRNSA is normally a military position and DCI civilian, I think I'll leave that decision to the president and the congress. That's why we keep them around. And yes, I'm aware that LeCarre's mole was Bill Haydon, so we can let Michael Hayden have the post.

Q: Intelligence officials, administration officials, and legislators have all said that NSA is acting within the law. Are they all lying?
A: The law is, in my opinion, sufficiently flexible that they have the latitude to honestly believe that they are not.

Q: Do YOU believe that they are lying?
A: See above. I have the great good fortune to not be a lawyer, and cannot even pretend to make that decision.

Q: Wait a minute! Aren't the telephone companies all claiming that they are NOT cooperating with the NSA in providing telephone records. Are they lying to protect themselves from the inevitable lawsuits?
A: Who says the NSA needs official cooperation? Their job is collecting information. That's what they do for a living. If the telcos haven't managed to achieve deniability, then maybe they are being run by their "customer service" departments.

Q: Well, then, what about the fact that all these calls are being recorded. Doesn't that concern you?
A: While I have no knowledge that they actually are being recorded, I'd be very disappointed if they were not. I see absolutely no harm in the recording of the calls. Practically every call made is now digitized and transmitted through an amazing technological labyrinth, and this has never been a concern. Why, then, be concerned if some of those digits spend more than their normal few milliseconds of life somewhere in an even larger labyrinth in the caverns below the NSA? It's only when they are decoded and scrutinized that the possibility of abuse should be raised; if a court order is required for this, then we are just as protected as we are (or aren't) already.

Intelligence agencies are positively compulsive about collecting information. While one might argue that vigilance against privacy encroachments is an ever increasing requirement, one could also make a good case for that war having been lost many petabytes ago. I do not despair, not because I have nothing to hide, but because everybody has something to hide. I'm insufficiently paranoid, notwithstanding having been declared so by the NY Times, to think that they will "get" me first, or alone.

In "The Dead Past," Isaac Asimov foresaw a situation where everyone's past was an open book. He ended the story with the expression "Happy Goldfish Bowl." It's sad that we are being driven by terrorists to a society where the goldfish bowl simile seems apt. But if it's inevitable, at least it seems to be for a good reason.

Traffic Analysis - Part II

When last we left the plucky National Security Agency, it was embroiled in an uproar about the (legal? illegal?) collection of telephone call records. To our amazement, we found that the extent of this data gathering would almost fill a cheap hard drive every day. We expected that they would use this valuable data to track communication patterns among... pretty much everyone. Expounding on the value of this traffic analysis as I did in Part One also reminds us of its limits. If there is a suspicion of malicious intent, what can the NSA do?

Permit me to digress for a moment. There was an interesting piece in Aviation Week some time ago that discussed aerial reconnaissance in Iraq. It seems that our surveillance aircraft were taking videos of Iraq at night. Of course there was a lot going on, most of it innocent, or at least innocent in the sense that it wasn't warlike mischief. But some people were up to just that, and their movements were recorded along with those of the innocents. If an improvised explosive device detonated the next day, the tapes could be reviewed and, working backwards from the explosion, the people who planted it could be tracked. Undoubtedly there were a lot of surprised insurgents until they caught on to how they were tracked down.

If the NSA is doing all this traffic analysis with our telephone calls, how can they determine whether something is mundane or minatory? Can they only have suspicions yet not act on them to prevent an IED-equivalent being detonated in the USA? One thing they could do prove their suspicions correct or not is to simply record all the telephone calls associated with the call records, i.e., every telephone call made in the country, and then go back and listen to them when their suspicions are aroused by the traffic analysis.

WHAT!!!!???? Did you just write that they could record every call made in the country?

I guess I did at that! And who better to do it? We give them billions of dollars a year; I would hope they could figure out how! Another little math exercise, another set of made-up but perfectly reasonable numbers:

250 million callers, 10 calls per day, 10 minutes per call, 1kByte per second digitizing rate. That comes to 1,500 terabytes per day of data. Can't fit that on a cheap hard drive, can you? But can the NSA fit it in the most sophisticated processing equipment on earth? Holographic storage, perhaps? Big tape libraries? Again, I sure hope so, or we're wasting our tax money. And, I think I may be exaggerating a little. It's unlikely that they record every call since there are many calls that originate and terminate in the same local office and really aren't transported over a network or are susceptible to "bugging" en masse. So pick your own number: 1,000TB per day? 500? 200? Whatever — I'd be dismayed if the NSA weren't up to it.

Now we have the makings of a proper scandal! Your call to the proverbial Aunt Tillie is on "tape" at Fort Meade. Not to mention your call to your bookie, your mistress, your accomplice... Ready to spend the rest of your life writing in Europe?

We're all guilty of something. With this treasure trove of illegally-obtained evidence, our government, no slouches in the guilty department itself, might as well just put guard towers on that anti-immigrant wall and declare that we're all in jail. How can we swim in the ocean now without getting shot? Simple: Recording everybody is almost the equivalent of recording nobody. With 25 billion minutes of calls to listen to every day, weekends included, it would require a staff of approximately 60 million people to listen to the recordings, and they would only survive for a few weeks before dying of boredom. In other words, they're in effect using what is jokingly referred to as "write-only memory" for making these recordings.

What, then is the point? The point is that the NSA has the call records, the recordings, and they are continuously analyzing the call traffic, domestic and foreign as well, the second of which is their avowed (and unclassified) mission. If there is a sudden increase in "chatter" or a suspicious pattern in the call record data, they can go back days, weeks, maybe even years to listen to the calls made by all the parties. It's hard to imagine a more powerful weapon against terrorism!

And it's hard to imagine what could create a bigger civil liberties uproar! Recording billions of calls of innocent citizens illegally. I can hear the ACLU storming the gates of the Supreme Court right now. Never mind putting the citizens in jail; how about the whole executive branch? Can you believe those bastards at the NSA and the CIA are testifying in open session that everything they're doing is legal? String 'em up. Is it worth losing our liberty, our privacy, our pastries*, in the pursuit of terrorism?

But before we string 'em up, let's just do a few seconds of doubt benefiting. Is it remotely possible that recording all our calls is legal? When we've heard all our lives that a court order is needed for a wiretap? We're hearing now that there is a special court that can secretly authorize wiretaps for security purposes, and thus there is a legitimate judicial process. Is the NSA bypassing it?

Perhaps not...

As a ham radio operator for most of my life, I've grown up with "The Communications Act of 1934" embedded in my alleged brain. One of the provisions had to do with "intercepting" communications. Before encryption and digital transmission, a lot of confidential information was transmitted in the clear, and there was nothing that the FCC could do to prevent one from listening to it. However, the Act very specifically provided that the information could not be "disclosed" to a third party. Without doing research or consulting a communications attorney, I don't know how much of this principle has survived to the present, but the theory behind it — one cannot use or benefit from intercepted information — almost certainly continues to apply.

A "wiretap," whether of a specific individual or on the massive scale suggested here, implies more than just recording. It implies that the information will be listened to and used. Otherwise, why bother? I've already discussed the "why bother." But, and this is the key question:

If a wiretap or recording made without a court order is never listened to, is it still illegal? If the NSA never listens to a recording without a court order, was that recording illegally made? Are "interception" and "disclosure" legally separable in this instance? How many can angels dance on the head of a pin? I can't answer these questions, but of all the speculation, extrapolations, assumptions, theories, and babble in this blogitem, I can guarantee one is correct: You can find well-meaning, smart, and sincere lawyers to argue both sides of this question. Absent a very specific act of congress or fiat from the Supreme Court, the NSA will be able to obtain the advice of counsel that the recording program is legal as long as a court has to authorize actually using any of the recordings.

In other words, all our telephone calls can be recorded, and the government can legitimately say "we're not breaking the law" as long as nobody listens to those calls without getting a court's permission. And, of course, getting permission simply requires a showing to be made that the calls probably contain foreign security information.

Enough for today. Tomorrow, let's try for a conclusion...


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*In fact, our pastries are only near the middle of the list of things the government is likely to take away. I put that in because it makes the sentence flow, it makes you feel that you're paying attention, and I'm actually working on a blogitem about pastries as I write this. And if they do try to take my pastries, they'll find out what an enraged citizenry is all about.

Traffic Analysis Part I

Sounds like a mundane term, right? Maybe one of those gadgets counting the cars going by to see if a traffic light is necessary on the corner. But it's also the term used to explain why the NSA is trying to collect all the telephone numbers we call. Traffic analysis is one of the most valuable tools in the arsenal of an intelligence agency. If you don't believe me, consider yourself as the analyst: When you get your telephone bill, don't you try to figure out who called whom? If you can't account for a call and are suspicious of your spouse, do you check the area code and try to remember where his (or her) old flame moved? If you are (correctly) suspicious of your teenager, do you try to figure out whether that hour-long call is about homework, elopement, or potential mayhem? Of course you haven't actually listened to the call itself. But you are performing traffic analysis just from the number, call duration, and time of day.

The National Security Agency does the same thing, and presumably is doing so by collecting records of all of our telephone calls. And – surprise! – they're better at analysis than you are. Even if the conversations are in a foreign language, a word code, or fully encrypted, they can still note that calls between two or more parties are occurring more frequently. Is it a prelude to a terrorist attack or a book club meeting? (There is a difference!) Are they discussing enriching literature or enriched uranium? I'd like to think that the NSA can usually tell. Traffic analysis is an extremely valuable tactic. I'd hate to deny it to the good guys. (That would be the USA, by the way.)

Is collecting our call records a violation of privacy? That's a good question to start an argument, and it clearly has. If the fact that you made a call to Mom or to your bookie is known to the NSA concerns you, then it probably is a violation. If you have a more relaxed attitude – everyone calls his mom, and bookies always seem to have a lot of telephones – then maybe you're not too concerned. I personally am not concerned; I recognize that many others are.

But that isn't the point of this blogitem. When I heard about the NSA program, I became curious about the technical aspects of it. How can even the NSA handle this massive classified data collection program? This question led me to make some rough assumptions and do a quick calculation:

There are 300 million people in the United States. 250 million of them are telephonically active.

Each one makes ten telephone calls per day.

For each of these calls, the NSA needs to store not just the calling number, but the called number as well. Not to mention the start time, and, for completed calls, the duration.

This is a truly massive amount of data! 250 million people * 10 calls/day * (10 bytes per calling number + 10 bytes per called number + 6 bytes for the start time + 3 bytes for the call duration in seconds)

Why, that comes to 72,500,000,000 bytes, or almost enough to fill a small hard drive in a cheap computer! (Tell me that my numbers are off - that people make twice as many calls. I'll tell you that that 10 bytes per number is too generous by far - it can be compressed to five bytes with no effort at all.)

Could something be wrong here? Is our candidate DCI* testifying behind closed doors about an enormous classified program whose daily take can't even fill a bargain computer disk? Does ATT need a secret room to collect this data? Could there possibly be more to it? Are we the nation in an uproar over 73 gigabytes per day of raw data? Let's ponder that over this holiday weekend.


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Can they possibly be thinking of confirming someone named Hayden as DCI? Haven't they read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy?

Triage

That unlikely heading begins a minirant on the subject of customer service. Not the usual anecdote of what this or that company did to me, of which we all have plenty, but a relatively calm diatribe (unitribe? semitribe?) about how easy it is to it better. I actually do customer service as part of my work experience, so this is not a theoretical exercise.

In a battle with many wounded, doctors perform triage. This means sorting the wounded to increase the number of survivors. Without even thinking about looking it up, I would guess that the "tri" part might mean sorting into three groups, and if it doesn't, it should. Folk etymology. The three groups in this case would be:

• Those wounded so seriously that no amount of medical attention will help them
• Those wounded to the extent that immediate attention will help them
• Those with sufficiently minor wounds that they can wait for attention

Needless to say, this is a continuum; and depending on how exigent the circumstance, people in the third group might get seen more quickly, or those in the second not quickly enough. The point is, some sorting is necessary and desirable.

A customer in need is wounded. Your product is or isn't doing what it shouldn't be or should. He is eager and anxious, two words that are not synonyms, and wants assistance now! He sends an email to a company and waits for a response. And waits and waits, growing crankier by the hour and frequently by the day. And who can blame him?

The company has an email queue and, since his email is "important to them," they get to it as the length of the queue permits. Two days later, a specialist reads the question, and responds, typically with a "cut-and-paste" paragraph about how important the email is, and then answers the question. Wrong! Wrong! (Also wrong is the answer, which most likely was to a question that was never asked, but that's a rant for another day.)

Dear Big Company Executive, (many of whom, I'm sure, read this blog first thing in the AM)

You are in management; you know Pareto's law. You may even know the Sturgeon's Law corollary - 80% of everything is crap. Here's the Rikl corollary: 80% of your customer's email can be answered, correctly, to the satisfaction of the customer, literally in seconds. Customer questions, relating to the "triage" heading, come in three broad groups:

• Simple questions that can be answered immediately by people with knowledge of your product, service, or web site
• Questions that, because customers are customers, are unclear, incomprehensible, or just plain bizarre
• More complicated questions, those that need a real specialist to answer

The RIKL 30-Second Email Response Solution

Group 1 cut and paste:

Dear Customer, thank you for your inquiry!
You can find the answer to this exact question on our web site at this link.
(or)
Here's how you can obtain manuals for this product (link).
(or)
No, although we provide many customized services, the one you have requested is not in our repertoire, even though you may truly believe it is legal...

Group 2 cut and paste:

Dear Customer, thank you for your inquiry!
Unfortunately, we don't understand what you are asking. Would you please resubmit your email including a reference to the product/function/body part/etc. you are inquiring about, so that we may research it and provide a proper response? More information on how to submit an inquiry may be found at this link.

Group 3 cut and paste:

Dear Customer, thank you for your inquiry!
This is an unusual inquiry and cannot offer our usual lightning-fast response to it because it will require some research. We hope to reply in X(hours or days).

That's it! Free and really good advice. The group 1's, perhaps the 80 per cent, will go away happy, and amazed at how good your service is. The group 2's, at least the ones capable of ratiocination, will re-think their question and be happy they didn't wait days to find out they would be getting no answer. Finally, the group 3's will know you're on the case. Is there anything in those responses that can't be communicated in less than a minute by one good person?

Also extremely helpful: Give the person answering these questions authoring access to a portion of your web site. Occasionally I get a question whose answer would benefit other customers as well. Instead of answering the questioner instantly, I edit the appropriate FAQ on our web site with the Q&A, and then refer him to that.

That's it. ONE person. SECONDS per inquiry. The balance of your "team" free to look at the 20% that cannot be handled with immediate dispatch, but will nonetheless get answered a lot sooner since the 80% are no longer in the queue.

Thank you. This has been very important to us.

The Ticking Clock

Do you remember the building of the Berlin Wall? Do you even remember the destruction of the Berlin Wall? If you remember both, don't forget to keep doing your mental exercises so you can continue to do so. If you remember only the latter, there's a good chance that the phrase that heads this blogentry is a metaphor for the passage of time, and nothing more.

Huh? Of course that's what it is. The biological clock is ticking, the clock is ticking on this project, the deadline, global warming...

But somewhen, bracketed by the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall, the non-metaphorical clock stopped ticking. Now our clocks are digital. If they look analog, they probably have quartz oscillators driving chip dividers running a liquid crystal display through a display formatter so you can see the mock hands "turning." Cheaper than a spring, gears, and a hand or three.
Even as I "type" this our metaphors are outliving us.

When Cats Learn to Grout

There is no doubt in my alleged mind that some science person out there is right this instant devoting his life to making pigs fly. You tell someone it's impossible and they make it happen. You! Mr. (or Ms.) Science Person! STOP IT! You are wasting your time and genius on this frivolous pursuit. I have a job for you.

There is no reason for a pig to fly. There is every reason for a cat to grout. With snow shoveling season (hopefully) past, it is time to repair the depredations of shovel and storm on the flagstones in the entryway. I could do this, but, inter alia, I'm lazy and don't know how. I could hire someone to do it, but most likely he'd be lazy, not know how, not show up, and want to get paid. It seems to me that one could design a grouting cat. The physical design is already perfect, and compared to a contractor, the cat is much more likely to show up and would work more cheaply.

How about it, Ms. (or Mr.) Science Person? A Nobel prize awaits.