Read Online @War: The Rise of the Military-Internet Complex by Shane Harris - Free Book Online Page B

text of an e-mail or Internet communication. The task of collecting this data, which was in the hands of corporations, was managed by the NSA’s Special Source Operations group, its primary liaison and conduit to the telecommunications companies, Internet service and communications providers, and other companies that moved and stored the information that the NSA wanted. The agency set up equipment at the companies’ physical facilities and installed surveillance devices on computers and networks that they controlled. One crucial participant, AT&T, which managed huge swaths of the telecom network, had a secure facility not far from the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters where it had historically provided mostly foreign communications for the intelligence agency. The company also allowed the government to install monitoring equipment at an office in San Francisco as part of the new domestic collection regime.
    The companies were not powerless to resist—one major firm, Qwest Communications, rebuffed the agency’s requests for telephone metadata because the government lacked a warrant. But most companies complied with the administration’s requests, owing largely to assurances that the president had authorized the collection, which, officials argued, made it legal. The companies became indispensable partners in a new global surveillance system. Only a handful of executives within each firm even knew that the NSA had spy portals inside their facilities. Corporate employees were cleared into the program on a strictly need-to-know basis, meant to limit the risk of exposure of the NSA’s clandestine mission. NSA employees were handpicked to work on the program. The product line grew rapidly. Thirty days after Bush had signed the emergency order, the new surveillance program was fully up and running. The military-Internet complex was born.
    Â 
    As significant as the NSA’s new authorities to listen in on phone calls and read e-mails were, it was the bulk collection of phone and Internet metadata that put the most power in Stellar Wind’s sails. A human analyst would never have enough time to listen to all those calls and read so many messages, and presumably the terrorists would mostly be communicating in code and not explicitly stating where they planned to attack and when. But contact chaining could illuminate the network based on how targets were connected to one another.
    Metadata was pouring into the agency’s computers and databases, faster than it could be analyzed in real time. Eventually, the agency would start to run out of storage space to keep its intelligence haul and electricity to power the computers that churned the information into intelligible graphs. And
intelligible
was a debatable term. NSA analysts created bigger contact chains than ever before. They fed the metadata into a massive graphing system that displayed connections as a bewildering array of hundreds of overlapping lines. Analysts called it the BAG, for “big ass graph.”
    The FBI and the CIA also used the metadata NSA obtained. These agencies either sent the NSA a specific request for information about a particular phone number or e-mail address—what the NSA called a “selector”—or they asked more broadly for information about a target’s contacts. These were known internally at the NSA as “leads.” The FBI and the CIA could submit leads in order to discover more leads, and then investigate those people. The NSA sent back reports, known as “tippers,” which contained the contact-chaining analysis that related to terrorism or potential terrorist links.
    The intelligence cycle didn’t always run smoothly. FBI agents complained that many of the leads the NSA supplied were dead ends—particularly the telephone numbers of suspected terrorists whom the agency believed were in the United States or had contacts there. But this team spying was a primitive model for the