Over the past few months, I’ve been reading the book Chatter by Patrick Radden Keefe. Without doing further research into the book, the title doesn’t give much indication as to what it might be about. However, the full title is a bit more revealing. Chatter: Uncovering the Echelon Surveillance Network and the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping.

The book was first published in 2005, but it’s even more topical today than when it was released. It speaks briefly to the idea that the government is wiretapping—yes, illegally—all the internet and telephony traffic passing through the United States, including that of its own citizens. But it has only been in the past few months that the Bush Administration has been subpoenaed for the release of these records.

Some events in the book are still playing out. The copy I read had an expanded afterword, updating a few things from between its original publication to July 2006, when the second version was printed. For its next printing, I would be very interested in hearing what Keefe has to say about the current situation. Even more interesting than that will be seeing what people are saying about it fifty (or five hundred) years from now. Perhaps nothing. Such is history.

Saying that I’d like to hear more of Keefe’s assessment should tell you what I think about his book. It is excellent. Although non-fiction, he paces the work much like a novel, with characters (interviewees), chapter hooks and cliffhangers, and rising and falling action. Obviously the best non-fiction is all this way, but usually these things are an after-thought compared to getting the facts out there. Keefe moves seamlessly (and without confusion) between past and present, and weaves insightful analysis from the facts.

As the title suggests, Chatter focuses on “Echelon”—a world-wide network designed to gather and analyze signals intelligence—or as we say in the ‘biz SIGNIT. [1] The National Security Agency monitors SIGNIT, of which ECHELON is a significant part. Most people speculate that ECHOLON was originally the name of the computer network itself, but now refers to the entire “network” of computers, analysts and support infrastructure. If you think about it, that’s really the best move the NSA could have made regarding the naming convention. For the longest time, they denied its very existence, though this is hardly atypical. Now they acknowledge it, but with the caveat that it has become synonymous with the very NSA itself.

I don’t really have the expertise nor time to go into detail about the system. If you’re curious, read Chatter; that’s what it’s about after all. Suffice it to say that it’s a network of supercomputers, listening facilities and wiretaps that monitors signals: telephony (cell and land), fax, internet and email traffic.

All intelligence agencies in the US are subject to oversight. This is a complex set of rules governing what is and is not legal, but pretty much be summed up in the following sentence: “Don’t spy on your fellow citizens.” That is to say, if you’re collecting intelligence on US persons, it has to be handed off to the FBI, who deals with that sort of thing by following the legal rules of warrants and due process and all that muddy nonsense that just complicates the war on terror. Er, I mean those important principles of checks and balances upon which our country was founded.

You may be thinking at this point “Gee, Mister, with all the phone calls and emails and stuff that gets routed through the country every day, how could any supercomputer possibly be powerful enough to determine which is US traffic and which is from foreign nationals?” And you may also be thinking, “In terms of email, wouldn’t that mean the intel analysts would be put in the sticky position of having to open the email and read it to determine whether or not they’re allowed to open the email and read it?”

The answers to both questions, respectively, are: they can’t and yes.

If you’ve been wondering what the specific deal is with the Bush administration being accused of approving illegal wiretaps, that’s it. It’s not that the NSA said, “We want to tap all the houses on this block. Hey, can we do that?” And Bush said yes, and the block was tapped. That would be a blatant violation of oversight laws and while conspiracy theorists would beg to differ, that doesn’t really happen.

What’s happened is this. The NSA called up the President, and said a little something like this:

“Mister Prez, this is the NSA. How are you, sir? Oh, wait, don’t answer. We already know. Hehehe! Heh, yeah. That’s…just a little joke.”

“Mister Prez, this is the NSA. How are you, sir? Oh, wait, don’t answer. We already know. Hehehe! Heh, yeah. That’s…just a little joke.”

“Um, we’re calling about a small issue that’s kind of popped up in this War on Terror. Sir, it’s like this. All those terrorist bad guys? Well they just don’t play fair. You know what they did now? Heh, nah, you’ll never believe it. No… well, okay, okay. Yeah, okay I’ll tell you what they did. Get this: sometimes, like especially when they’re in the country, they use our own phone networks! Oh man, head-slap, right? I know! But after they’re over here, well, we’re having a hard time tracking them because they’re on American networks, and we have to go through the FBI, and you know with them it’s always all sour grapes because our agency gets to be more top secret than their agency. I know, sir. So unprofessional.”

“But not only that, there’s a huge amount of traffic that’s routed from overseas to our networks. That was a bit of foresight on our part, don’t you think? Like having all the major internet backbones run through the states. Ka-ching! But you know then that’s another problem…”

“Well, uh, no, no. Um, not a series of tubes. The problem with this traffic is that we know some is from terrorists, but, heh, well, there’s no way to tell which. Mmhmm. Er, no, no. We’re talking ones and zeros, here, not voice telephony. They don’t type with accents. Uh, no. Just regular ones and zeros; no sir, the numbers are not in ‘Muslim’. Muslim isn’t even their langu–um, never mind.”

“The point is: there’s too much data, and we don’t really know who it’s from. So here’s what we were thinking. Um, we’d like, maybe, if we could just, you know, kind of funnel all the data through our computers.”

“Well, I guess there would be some Americans’ data in there, but you know… Terrorists! Ah Haha! No, no, Sorry, Sir. Didn’t mean to scare you, but I–Terrorists! Haha. Okay, no I’ll stop. Terror–Eh? Ah Ha! Gotcha there, I didn’t say the whole word! Haha! Eh, heh. Uh…”

“But seriously. We could catch so many terrorists, way more than last year. Uh huh, yeah, oh, yeah, definitely more than seven. Sure. So that’s the plan. Tap the entire internet, entire telephony backbone, and you know what’s even better: we’ve got this computer thing, sorts through all the data. We don’t even have to look at every little piece. Let the computer handle the bulk and it only sends us the juicy stuff.”

“Um, plan B? Not sure I follow… Legal? Well, no. It’s not if you interpret the law the way it was, you know, written. Strictly speaking, that’s not allowed. But, uh, you know. Just don’t tell anyone.”

I suspect the actual conversations were probably boring administrative ones, but the end result is the same: the NSA is doing illegal wiretapping only because the taps they have are so ridiculously broad that they’re guaranteed to catch conversations from regular citizens. And according to the law, that’s illegal. That’s the controversy.

Chatter discusses this aspect of SIGINT, as well. When the NSA was formed, communications—especially wireless satellite communications–were only conducted by big, powerful governments who could afford it. The same big, powerful governments that, fortuitously enough, our big powerful government wanted to spy on. The problem today is that Joe Blow can go out and git hisself one o’dem newfangled satellite phone-jiggers and suddenly be off the land-line or cell-phone based network. Anyone can go buy one, so the airwaves which previously only had chatter from the folks you wanted to spy on now have chatter from everyone.

To make matters worse, the people that the big powerful government wants to spy on today are small, tiny, anonymous regular people. They’re not even Middle Eastern, necessarily. Another problem: big powerful governments don’t move. Russia didn’t collective pick up its fields and factories and go hide in Madagascar. Small regular people move around like drops through an ocean (or needles through haystacks, if you prefer less appropriate similes) so just because they had a satellite phone today, doesn’t mean they don’t also have email, cell phone, land line, and smoke signals. Rather, they probably do.

Despite the mysterious “big brother” persona that it has, the NSA does not have the technology nor the resources to begin to sift through even a fraction of this data. Echelon was probably effective when it was started. Today, if it’s even still being used, it must be completely overwhelmed to the point where there’s really no purpose to even bother leaving it turned on any more. And yet as recently as 2002, the NSA was asking for those overarching wiretaps. They’ve tapped everybody, which also means they’ve succeeded in tapping nobody. We’ve lost liberty and privacy, and gained zero safety in return.

If there was any sort of complaint I could make about the book, it’s that Keefe has a really hard time nailing down his own thoughts on the subject. This is not unexpected, and any time you deal with the intel world, it happens. Stuff is classified, and even within a tight-knit community, you end up eating lunch with other people who aren’t allowed to tell you what they do, and you’re not allowed to tell them what you do. When anyone tries to come along and figure it out using nothing but open source material, there’s bound to be speculation without conclusion. Keefe himself recognized this. Toward the end of the book, he wrote that he merely managed to define the boundaries of the informational hole. What goes on within remains persistently classified.

I would highly recommend this book to all Americans. I can think of no better source of information to explain the current controversy in illegal wiretapping. The specifics of today’s wiretapping cases are not in this book, but all the information and explanations that you need to evaluate them are. If you’re looking for a solid foundation on which to build an understanding of the SIGINT world, this is it.

-Ted


1. In the intelligence community (called the IC), the various types of intelligence end in -INT. Intelligence derived from human sources is HUMINT. Intel from open (unclassified) sources, such as Google Maps, is OSINT. Photographic imagery intel is IMINT. (There are others, but you get the idea.) It doesn’t take much to prompt the jokes. After spending a long day in the Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF), analysts will start talking about MENUINT (what’s for dinner), TRAFFICINT (if there are any accidents on the highway), and CLOUDINT (if it looks like it’s going to rain). [Back]