A nagging thought on NSA surveillance, not terrorism related.

[1-Old-Man]

I have to wonder how it is that this all inclusive surveillance has not resulted in the arrest and convictions of hundreds and hundreds of white collar criminals and in fact even whatever color collar common criminals wear too. And if the NSA is all over the internet then how is it that the creators of all manner of destructive viruses aren't in jail too. You'd think with all its capability the NSA would be doing work that it is uniquely qualified to do and would actually be useful to those of us (taxpayers) who pay for its existence. Or to say it bluntly, they are so god damned good and we are paying for them why aren't they doing useful work for us?

[Pholus]

1. They pick and choose their battles right now.

There is a finite amount of resources to dedicate to this, and your concerns fall under a different sphere of influence.

This is about cyberwar, not law enforcement (though the mission creep to it will likely occur as the technology matures). Doing what you request raises the program visibility too soon. It needs to be there for a while and get accepted.

Listening to Leahy's statement I think I have a decent theory...

Certainly, terror tracking is the main goal but Leahy specifically discusses the conflation of results from a productive program (overseas tracking) with an apparently non-productive program (domestic tracking).

Why would they do that? Well, first off you have to consider the legal opinion they are using. It is not illegal (or even considered collection) if a human doesn't look. But software trolling is okay and not a rights violation.

One precept of cyber-war is information control. The ability to influence a message rapidly in response to events. DARPA has their SMISC program ("Social Media in Strategic Communications&quot . They desire the ability to map out networks to discover the most influential sources and see which stories are taking hold in public opinion as fast as possible as a defense.

The offense side of the capability is being able to plant your own messages in return in places that will propagate perhaps even more quickly, countering an initial outrage inducing story even before it takes root.

Bush made it legal. Seemed whacky when he said the US had a right to do domestic propaganda, but all the pieces seem to fit quite well together.

[alc]

2. don't want to expose their methods

Every time they use their surveillance they show that they have capabilities. If they use it in courts, the defendant has the right to know how they got it so their expert witness can dispute the validity (someone else may have used the computer/phone). Even without courts, they tip off terrorists when they use it. If a drone strike hits a secret meeting that was only discussed on a couple of channels (phone, email, etc) the terrorists know that channel was compromised. That's another reason we only want to take out the top terrorists and not anyone we can.

The other issue is manpower. The computer analysis most likely spits out 1000s of potential threats a day (if not much more) just for potential terrorism. That's a wild guess on my part, but I do have experience in big data analytics and visualization and have see reported numbers of terrorist attacks have been averted and assume the goal is to stop ALL attacks (number of false matches you need to manually rule out depends on how many missed matches you are willing to let through). When a person looks at the computer matches, some are obviously false hits but others may take hours or days to rule them out. If they were looking for potential criminals, they'd likely have millions of people per day to look into in greater detail. They cannot pass millions of "leads" off to the FBI every day.