News at 11: NSA conducts worldwide surveillance

By Lou Dolinar

Can the New York Times be prosecuted for espionage for exposing the NSA surveillance program? The Washington Post looks at how the administration is going after leakers, and Powerline is on the case as well.

The Times can make a pretty good argument that it dry-cleaned its stories of any information that would hinder pursuit of terrorists, something that could sit well with a jury. However, in keeping little secrets, they let out a big one, whether by accident or design: The NSA, rendered a pitiful helpless giant by new communications technology at the end of the Cold War, has got its mojo back. The spy agency is capable of world-wide surveillance again. That's much bigger news to foreign intelligence services than a naughty little domestic surveillance program.

The Times had a bad case of ideological blinders here. Like the rest of the Left, it seems to have assumed that the NSA always could listen to everyone all the time everywhere, that when you said something bad (“bomb”) computers picked it up and put you on their watch list. Then when you died, the recording angel would count the good and bad marks...no wait, that's another myth. (Al Qaeda also buys into this myth. Our intelligence agencies are well aware that AQ operatives have been trained to assume constant surveillance and  use verbal codes and great care when speaking on open phone lines. The Times will have no problem finding numerous experts to testify on this point. )  

Ratting out the NSA to Al Qaeda isn't the problem.   Its capabilities as an intelligence agency are. NSA was in deep trouble by the early 1990s, and where it has gone since then is highly classified but assumed by many to be downhill. The object of its attention, the Soviet Union, had faded. At the same time, virtually all its equipment—the product of decades of $600 toilet seats in the Pentagon's black budget-- became obsolete as international telecommunications traffic began shifting from satellite and microwave relay stations, to fiber optic cable. The recording angel was going deaf.

Why? The nice thing about satellite and microwave based communication, from the NSA's standpoint, is that it can readily be intercepted, and there's not a damn thing the bad guys can do about it, except to encrypt, which causes its own problems. AT&T has an earth station that's pointed at satellite X that picks up transatlantic calls. NSA hires a couple of retired AT&T engineers and builds a bootleg copy hundreds of miles away, behind razor wire fences and guard dogs, but within the satellite's footprint. Presto, just like Direct TV, your phone calls to Moscow have a second subscriber. Microwave transmissions—which in theory travel line of sight between terrestrial towers--are a little more difficult, but advanced satellites and vast quantities of black money did the trick there as well.

Fast forward to 2006. Many of those satellite slots are taken up by direct broadcast satellites bringing the joy of MTV, Jerry Springer Uncut, and Bill O'Reilly to the masses. Microwave towers are increasingly rare. The economics of fiber optic cable is wiping out the competition. We're left with a system of fiber connected by computers that carries all our phone traffic, and incidentally all that Internet traffic that didn't exist in 1990.  (We'll save packet-switching for another day.)

The NSA recording angel has problems with this. Where once it could listen passively without interference, now it has to get down and dirty, a comparative rarity in the old days. It needs black bag jobs to physically tap the fiber (non-trivial but possible) or compromise the computers through back doors (surreptitiously hacked or OEM'd) or through co-location agreements with network operators who deliberately divert traffic to compromised switches, that last being the method of choice, according to the Times. 

The worst part is that it can get caught. The taps can be found and removed, the back doors patched, the operators sued or ordered by their governments to clean up the taps, reroute the calls.

If the Times coverage of the NSA is correct, the NSA is capable of tracking calls from anywhere in the world to the United States, then following them to their ultimate destination in something like real time. That in turn suggests rather strongly that the recording angel has overcome its well-known problems, is deep into the computers that control telephony and the Internet, and is generally kicking butt world-wide. There's been some speculation in this area, prior to the Times publication, but little concrete.

Now that the information has been certified by the Paper of Record, the oppo, as they used to call it, may be inclined to pull the plug where possible and route around U.S. networks too, something that wasn't possible when the NSA was listening over the air. With any luck, our allies won't and our semi-friends will look the other way, and the Third World won't have the technological savvy to do a thing, but who knows? Thanks to the Times, the recording angel's job got a lot more complicated.  And that isn't going to sit well with a jury.