"I cross-referenced his YouTube profile through his MySpace..." - Kyle Broflovski
The kids of South Park had it right six years ago, using social media to track down terrorists. Three years later, in 2010, the National Security Agency began creating sophisticated graphs identifying the social connections of some Americans.
That's according to a new report from The New York Times, parsing out new details in documents leaked from the N.S.A. by Edward Snowden. According to the documents, the N.S.A. began analyzing phone call and email logs in November of 2010 to track the associations of some Americans for foreign intelligence purposes.
In an N.S.A. memorandum from January 2011, the data-centric agency stated it was now authorized to conduct "large-scale graph analysis on very large sets of communications metadata without having to check foreigness" of the email addresses, phone numbers, or other addresses to find connections between intelligence targets overseas and people living in the U.S.
Previously, analysis of such data was permitted only for foreign targets, due to concerns about breaching the privacy of American citizens. Before the change in policy, when the chain of a foreign target's contacts reached and American citizen or resident, the data digging had to stop.
Such communications, along with public data like Facebook profiles, GPS location information, tax data, and other commercial data, were used to create "sophisticated graphs of some American' social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions, and other personal information," said The New York Times.
The documents leaked to the grey lady did not describe what resulted from such investigations, but it does add to the growing public knowledge about the N.S.A.'s level of access to, and use of, Americans' private information.
The agency declined to say how many Americans' communications were analyzed by the social-private data graph hybrid, saying, "All data queries must include a foreign intelligence justification, period," and "All of N.S.A's work has a foreign intelligence purpose." The spokesperson added, "Our activities are centered on counterterrorism, counterproliferation and cybersecurity."
The N.S.A. justifies its change in policy - allowing the targeting of Americans' "metadata" and social networking information without even a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (or FISA court) warrant - with a 1979 Supreme Court ruling that Americans have no expectation of privacy about the numbers they had called, which the Justice Department and Pentagon has since taken to include the timing, location, and other "metadata," but not the content of emails.
And anyone who has applied for a job knows that Facebook, MySpace, and other semi-private/public information on social networks are accessible to anyone who really wants to get that information (including the kids in South Park).
The N.S.A.'s data collection from social media networks and more provate sources is no laughing matter: Not everyone agrees that the 1979 Supreme Court decision, Smith v. Maryland, grants these powers of warrantless surveillance. "The NSA apparently believes it can conduct this surveillance because 30 years ago the Supreme Court upheld the government's warrantless collection of basic information about a criminal suspect's telephone calls over the course of a single day," said ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer to the USA Today.
"But the claim that this narrow case from the analog era authorizes the mass surveillance of hundreds of millions of Americans is outlandish," said Jaffer. "Our intelligence-oversight system is utterly broken."