Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Communications 102

Communications 102

Having bored you with the five links required to effect a communication let me focus on the transmission link. That is where the communication enters the airspace and is most vulnerable to interception. Once it is emitted it becomes a candidate for eves-dropping.

According to an EX NSA chief the reason for the huge data or Mega data base was to connect the link between a known suspect who transmits a communication and someone who receives it. By having on hand, a universe of communications (everything transmitted in the last year) data it is possible to take a cell phone used by a terrorist and compile a list of everybody that phone talked to in the last year. In that list are a series of data records which contain sender#, receiver#, tower nodes, times, call duration and perhaps more.

The extent of a data record will depend on what the telephone companies are collecting as data elements. It could be they have a copy of verbal texts, e-mail texts, graphics transmissions and texting messages. If they have these you can add them to the data record I have shown above. I doubt that the telephone companies have this extended information but we know they compile the data records shown in the above paragraph.

Thus having this meta-data base allows the NSA to glean from a history file an organizational profile showing the networks of who is calling whom. In the old days tracing could only be done when the call was viable but now it is possible, long after the caller has hung up. Obviously having a tool that can access the totality of a historical data-base requires a huge facility and cooperation from the commercial service providers. However there are limits to what can be provided. Like I said I doubt the service providers collect the content of the calls except maybe text type messages, or graphics and even these I would be skeptical about. Still having reams of telephone records showing everybody the phone called in the last year gives an intelligence analyst a gold mine of material. Perhaps most importantly it provides new names and telephone numbers that can be further analyzed and developed. Before long it becomes clear who the network of conspirators (terrorists) includes. Next it is necessary to find out what is being discussed.

Now what is being revealed is that this phase, identifying the network, is necessary before proceeding on to phase two which is determining what the network is discussing. It would be in phase 2 that the focus would narrow into determining the detail of the actual conversations, e-mails, text messages and graphic transmissions. This phase is where a warrant would be required and offers a clear line of demarcation from phase one. In this a citizen is left to wonder just how much is the telephone company collecting vs what the enforcement agencies are going to have to further develop in phase 2.

One of the things I haven’t discussed is data mining, which is using search engines to gather the mountain of information that is available on the World Wide WEB.