The Security Mentor

Opinion piece from a former NSA analyst. Read the whole thing, it's worth your time and is important.

This is a man who proudly supported many NSA missions and who knows how the agency works. He writes about the recently revealed mass surveillance program.

He argues that it hurts security:

I know of at least two [FBI] agents who were pulled from their duties tracking down child abusers to investigate everyone who called the same pizza parlor as a person who received a call from a person who received an overseas call. There are plenty of similar examples.

He reminds us that our government is not giving us the whole story:

So, besides knowing that it's illegal, that is provides useless information, that it takes law enforcement agents away from investigating and preventing crimes actually being committed, and that it erodes civil liberties, we have no clue how bad it really is.

He shares his professional knowledge about the impact of "but we're not listening to the calls" spying:

And so what if the NSA isn't listening to the calls themselves? An intelligence agency doesn’t need to hear your chatter to invade your privacy. By simply tying numbers together -- an intelligence discipline of traffic analysis -- I assure you I can put together a portrait of your life. I'll know your friends, your hobbies, where your children go to school, if you’re having an affair, whether you plan to take a trip, and even when you're awake or asleep. Give me a list of whom you’re calling and I can tell most of the critical things I need to know about you.

Why should you care if you have "nothing to hide"? (If you have nothing to hide, why are they spying on you?).

NSA has more than its share of bitter, vindictive mid- and senior-level bureaucrats. I would not trust my personal information with these people as I have personally seen them use internal information against their enemies.

But we're chasing terrorists, right? Doesn't that make it necessary?

...the enemy numbers in the hundreds at best. NSA is collecting data on hundreds of millions of people who are clearly not the enemy. These numbers speak for themselves.

UPDATE 5/17:

Someone else has worked the numbers. Jonathan David Farley knows about the "data mining" techniques the NSA uses. Those techniques aren't going to keep us safe. They try to see who's called whom in the hope of finding who's connected to terrorism. First, that wastes everyone's time with bogus results: for example one of Osama's brothers invested in a company that George W. Bush ran. Second, it completely misses sleeper cells where the members aren't calling each other.

UPDATE 5/18

Fascinating. The Baltimore Sun reports that in 1999 the NSA was working on a project ("ThinThread") that would sift data for relevancy, and protect Americans by auditing for abuse and by encrypting personal data until its release was authorized.

The NSA scrapped it in favor of the current program which doesn't do the same quality control on the data and which has none of the protections against abuse. In other words, they reduced national security in order to have a system open to be abused.

Without ThinThread's data-sifting assets, the warrantless surveillance program was left with a sub-par tool for sniffing out information

How subpar?

The mass collection of relatively unsorted data, combined with system flaws that sources say erroneously flag people as suspect, has produced numerous false leads, draining analyst resources, according to two intelligence officials.