Washington Times - February 7, 2006
Wartime surveillance and Congress TODAY'S EDITORIAL
from which...
<snip>
Once it learns to ignore Pat Leahy and company, Congress should realize the function of the NSA's surveillance. As Attorney General Alberto Gonzales put it yesterday: "It is the modern equivalent to a scout team sent ahead to do reconnaissance or a series of radar outposts designed to detect enemy movements," he explained. "As with all wartime operations, speed, agility, and secrecy are essential to its success." Would Congress have tried to thwart President Roosevelt's intelligence operations after Pearl Harbor? That's the question lawmakers should ask themselves. Any responsible lawmaker would have to say no.
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This is interesting, revealing and astoundingly stupid.
How do the radar surveillance and scout mission metaphors hold up when tested against the actual threats we've seen thus far? Not very well I think.
In both cases, the goal is to identify the activities of an identifiable foe - in the case of a scout team, through infiltrating enemy held territory and, in the case of a radar array, scanning for incoming aircraft and guided ordinance (cruise and ballistic missiles, for example).
If these techniques were employed against all conceivable threats - if, for example, you dispatched your scout teams to lookover all terrestrial real estate, just in case a foe decided to use an unlikely route of attack and your radar systems were tasked with keeping track of all aerial movement, everywhere, the amount of data available to you would be overwhelming and therefore, far less valuable from an intelligence point of view.
The scout team knows where the enemy is and goes there, seeking to track movement, activity and force strength (do they have two armored divisions in the Dreaded Korg Valley or ten? Is there close air support?). The radar array examines portions of the sky considered to be likely vectors of attack (the US, through NORAD and other agencies, does monitor an exceptionally big slice of the sky via terrestrial based radar and from orbit...but this is for multiple purposes).
The NSA's activities, which have more in common with data mining -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining> -
than the targeted surveillance of likely suspects, do not track well with Mr. Gonzales' Tom Clancy novel-esque statements. The NSA is treating a large body of surveillance gathered data as worthy of attention. This is like looking for a needle in a haystack by first assuming it's needles all the way down and then carefully examining the properties of each bit of hay to disprove your all-needle hypothesis. No doubt you'll find a needle one day, but through the dumbest route possible.
The number of terrorists in the world is remarkably small when compared to the planetary population (or even the population of a single city like Cleveland or Baghdad). The proper way to find them is by acknowledging the very thin profile of the active terrorist cohort and devising investigative and policing methods (backed up by some modest amount of military force for dealing with the most heavily armed) of finding and intercepting them.
Of course, this would require the abandonment of the entire "war" meme which has proved so useful for Western politics in general and American politics in particular.
.d.
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"I never saw any of them again - except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them." --- R. Chandler, The Long Goodbye