Ride the Lightning
Cybersecurity and Future of Law Practice Blog
by Sharon D. Nelson Esq., President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
NSA is Graphing Our Social Connections
October 2, 2013
On September 28th, The New York Times carried yet another startling story of what the NSA has been up to. Since 2010, it has used its huge data collection to come up with sophisticated graphs of some Americans' social connections – graphs that can identify their associates, locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information.
As we now know, in 2010 the NSA began analyzing phone call and e-mail logs to look at Americans' networks of associations. This was intended to help track connections between intelligence targets overseas and people in the U.S. But then the NSA was authorized to conduct "large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreignness" according to an NSA memorandum. Is foreignness even a word?
Worse yet, the NSA can augment communications data with material from public and commercial sources, including bank codes, insurance information, Facebook (and presumably all) social media profiles, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls, GPS data, property records and tax data. This is known as (I love the double speak quality of the name) "enrichment" data.
Although the data on Americans has not been denied, the NSA simply says that "all data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period." Based on everything we have learned thus far, that reassurance offers scant comfort.
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