Speed Traps

Given the state of hysteria from the screeching class, and their MSM progenitors in regards to the hue and cry over the NSA's ongoing tracking of civil phone records,  I thought I'd take a moment and shine a bit of light on the topic.

In order to draw some comparisons of the NSA's telephony traffic data mining to some other widely accepted practices, let's look at something we're familiar with seeing in daily life.

The police officer who monitors the speed of traffic via radar.

What happens when an officer is running radar at the side of the road?  Well, let's break it down.

Each and every car in the lanes under observation is hit by the radar beam.

Each and every car's licence plate may be visible on the video from the patrol unit's dashboard video camera and recorder.  Those recordings may be archived for later review.

Ninety Nine point Nine-ish percent of all traffic passing that officer's radar, unmolested.  And most of them were in fact, speeding.  But not egregiously, and so proceed on their merry way. 

And why no complaints about an invasion of privacy?

Let's look at that.

The cars are not on private property.  Rather, they're rolling along a public thoroughfare.  The mere fact of their presence on those roads is public knowledge.  And, if they're travelling along the highways equipped with (for example) Texas Department of Transportation (TXDOT) cameras, a record of each car's transit is created.

Now, even though I'm rather opposed to police cameras in terms of general street level monitoring, I do understand the benefits of such on the freeways and other primary traffic routes.  And records from those records can be used for many practical and valuable applications.

Visual analysis of the tapes can reveal factors which create choke points for the flow of traffic.

Data capture software applied to the same tapes can count the number of cars in any given moment, or over any measured period of time.

From those tapes, traffic patterns can be decuced, and when changes to the roadways are considered, certain extrapolations, projectoins and predictions can be made.

And certainly, more nefarious patterns can be detected.  Such as the small percentage of drivers who selfishly drive their cars on the shoulder of the road to cut ahead of traffic, or who cut through a corner gas station to avoid a pesky traffic light.

Not only can those patterns be identified, but so also can the cars be positively I.D. by their license plates.  And by extension, so can their registered owners.

And still, no cries about a Right of Privacy?

Well, no.  Not insofar as a mere recording of that which is clearly observable on a public highway.

Now, if our Officer Friendly were to single out a particular car from those streams of traffic for exceeding the speed limit, no privacy is yet lost.  A bit of anonymity perhaps, but nothing more.  And if nothing more than the brief transaction of a license check and a citation written occurs, then the only erstwhile privacy lost was that which was not truly private, i.e; the driver and his car's interior being visible to Officer Freindly as he performs his duties.

It is those parts of the car's interior which are not in plain sight, which enjoy the same extended presumption of a Right of Privacy as one's home.  But that which is in plain view is possessed of no such right.

So, if our intrepid Officer were to observe some contraband lying in plain sight in that car's interior, then a transformation occurs.  With the introduction of probable cause to the situation, then the mechanisms of law become available for the State to assert it's right as empowered by the Constitution.  Officer Friendly, securing either the permission of the driver, or the permission of a duly empowered Judge via a properly issued warrant, may then intrude on the driver's privacy.  And so, the search begins in earnest, leaving no corner or crevase of the car unexamined.

It is in much the same manner that the NSA's data mining operation is likely conducted.

The hundreds of millions, even tens of billions of records of all calls made in the U.S., even in a week's time, would be impossible for any number of people to individually review.  It simply cannot be done.

But pumping those records through an intellegently designed relational database can, much like the aforementioned highway studies, reveal patterns.  Some of those patterns can shine the light on particular "cars", or in the NSA's case, specific phone numbers, either as call originators or as receivers of multiple calls from other suspect numbers.

It is from the sifting of billions of those records that certain numbers reveal themselves as having pattern-links to phones which are known to belong to people with links to the shadowy world of terrorism.

Call detail records are the equivalent of seeing millions of cars pass by a parked police cruiser.  And the software which is looking at those records is the equivalent of a speed-gun's radar beam.  Nothing more.

Fact is, I'll wager that your company's PBX came from the manufacturer with a call-accounting package as part of the deal.  I've know this, because I've been the corporate buyer of such on more than one occasion, and I've been on the paid consultancy side of the fence on a few other deals.

Companies, and especially call-centers, use call accounting software to track all manner of telephony trends.  Peak calling times, calls to or from the most heavily trafficed area codes, average call duration, shortest and longest calls, most calls to or from a given extension; the possibilities are nearly endless.  They also find and identify phone abuse by their employees, of times resulting in disciplinary actions or termination.

The NSA's data-mining program is a Call Accounting Program, writ large.  But it is no more invasive than the police radar beam, only looking at the exterior of hundreds of millions of calls as the zip along the wires. 

Looking at the traffic data reveals nothing of the interior of those calls, which would be the actual conversations.

Yet, it is not until a suspicious call-pattern is revealed that an NSA type agency will hand over it's probable cause to a more active, investigative and enforcement agency, such as the FBI.  Who will then use that probable cause to secure a warrant from the FISA court, allowing the Feddies to then finally, actually and not until then...  listen in on the calls to and from the number(s) in question, in order to further determine the nature and scope of, if any, terrorist plots and schemes.

For a more scholarly and experienced view of the constructs of the actual Data Mining, I urge you to go and read Mr. DuToit's extremely well done pimer on the topic.  You really do need to do exactly that, if you haven't already. 

Note that none of this requires any names, nor the content of the calls—that would be the privacy of the thing, and that’s where it seems that the NSA, if they’re telling the truth, has been quite circumspect.

But what this data gives the smart analyst is that when you establish that (357) 243-3006 belonged to Abdul El-Bomba, who received a call from his brother Aziz, a known member of Hezbollah in Syria, you now have the ability to focus only on all the calls Abdul made and received, to see who was calling him and whom he was calling. That would be a couple hundred calls, out of the (literally) tens of billions of records you’ve collected.

Be it on a Public Highway, or a Public Utility, the exterior of your private conveyence is not a private fact.  It is rather, a freely observable matter of public record.

Really, it's not hard to understand.  Except for idealogical lefties.  And the only thing it seems they understand these days is their hatred of All Things Bush.

I salute the NSA for doing their job, and doing it damned well indeed, as evidenced by over four years with no further terrorists successes since that fateful September day in 2001.

Due in no small part, I'm sure, to their Data Mining programs, which the howling assmonkeys of the left would love to see canceled.  They've already wrought great damage to the programs with their coordinated publicity, tipping the U.S.'s hand to the jihadists.  I wonder what classified asset they'll betray next, and when?

Comments

[Rivrdog]

Excellent topical coverage, sir. Please note the excellent editorial on said subject by the Analog Kid on Random Nuclear Strikes blog.

I do have to take exception of your characterization of those opposed as leftis assmonkeys, though.

It seems that a number of the Stupid Party have also jumped on the bandwagon.

[marcus]

I've been arrested twice, both because of speed traps.

1st...Officer made the comment that my eyes were kinda bloodshot...had I been smoking P*T? I replied that his eyes looked glazed... had he been eating donuts?

2nd...Officer said he was gonna issue me an "IUD" and I got upset and told him he better not be calling me a p*ssy.

Both were invasions of privacy and a violation of my civil rights.