Loren Thompson, Contributor
I write about national security, especially its business dimensions.
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6/18/2013 @ 11:44AM |1,517 views
Why NSA Came Knocking At Google's Door
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The National Security Agency was established in 1952 to collect electronic intelligence about the Soviet Union and other overseas threats. However, its traditional tracking and intercept methods were undermined by new information technologies just as the threat from terrorists began to heat up. (Photo credit: DonkeyHotey)
Over the last few weeks the world has been treated to a feast of information about how America’s most secretive intelligence outfit, the National Security Agency, does its work — courtesy of celebrity traitor Edward Snowden. If you’re one of those people who thinks the world is awash in conspiracies, then it’s no surprise that NSA is conducting domestic surveillance of the Internet and other communications. However, if you live in the real world of limited government and lawyers, NSA’s domestic surveillance program is a bit of a puzzle.
Like other parts of the intelligence community such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, NSA is chartered to collect and analyze information about foreign threats. There isn’t a lot of leeway in its charter for listening in on Americans, or even foreigners living in America, unless their actions can be tied to a security risk originating overseas. Purely domestic threats are the responsibility of law-enforcement agencies like the FBI.
So contrary to some of Mr. Snowden’s public ramblings about what NSA is up to, the domestic surveillance program is something of an anomaly. Thanks largely to the reporting of the Washington Post, we now know that at least four domestic surveillance efforts were set up by NSA after the 9-11 attacks — two big ones to track so-called metadata about Internet and telephone traffic passing through the U.S., and two much smaller ones aimed at monitoring the content of suspicious transmissions.
We also know that safeguards are in place to protect the privacy of citizens, including a special court that determines when tracking and intercept activity is permissible, and a bevy of government lawyers who sometimes block requests for surveillance before they even reach the special court. However, what we haven’t gotten much of is a broader explanation as to why NSA needed to work with companies like Google GOOG +1.66% andMicrosoft MSFT -0.06% if it was to effectively counter the terrorist threat. To understand that part of the story, you have to know not just how threats have evolved, but how telecommunications technology has changed.
The National Security Agency was established in 1952 to collect electronic intelligence about the greatest security threat America had ever faced — an expansionist Soviet Union armed with nuclear weapons. During the 40-year Cold War that followed its birth, the biggest problem NSA and other intelligence agencies faced in divining Soviet intentions and capabilities was that Eastern Bloc countries were largely closed to outsiders.
To accomplish its piece of the intelligence mission, NSA assembled a costly network of collection systems designed to listen in on Soviet communications and other electronic transmissions. There were billion-dollar eavesdropping satellites with names like Mercury and Mentor, airborne collection systems such as the Navy’s EP-3 Aries planes that flew along the Sino-Soviet periphery, submarines that secretly monitored radio traffic from littoral waters, and a host of other systems.
That architecture is still largely in place. In 2010 the National Reconnaissance Office launched a signals-intelligence satellite to be used by NSA that was publicly described as the biggest satellite in history. It’s a safe bet that U.S. attack submarines are listening in on the radio traffic in North Korea and Syria even as you read these words (atmospheric conditions along coastlines sometimes facilitate interception of signals by bending them away from their normal propagation paths).
What is not in place, though, is the old circuit-switched, radio-frequency telecommunications infrastructure used by industrialized countries in the last century. That has largely been superseded by packet-switched communications using Internet protocols that are carried on fiber-optic lines buried in the ground or running along seabeds. To the extent that radio technology is still in use for two-way communications, as in the case of smart phones, its effective radiated power seldom exceeds 50 miles. Smart phones used in urban areas often have their ranges de-tuned to a mere dozen miles so that more users can be crowded into the local network.
This is a big problem if you are trying to listen in from geosynchronous orbit 22,000 miles away, because even with antennas the size of football fields the signals are too faint to pick up. It might be feasible to boost the sensitivity of collection systems in low earth orbit to a point where they can detect cell-phone traffic, but satellites at that altitude are whizzing across the earth’s surface at several miles per second, so you’d have to deploy a hundred just to do continuous monitoring of a country like Pakistan.
Fortunately for NSA, the world has become a more open place since the Soviet Union collapsed, and so there are many opportunities for listening in on foreign radio transmissions from overseas ground stations. Conventional wisdom has it that a U.S. embassy isn’t complete without a detachment of on-site NSA technicians. The bigger problem for NSA is all those fiber-optic cables running under the oceans or along railroad rights-of-way that host most of today’s telecommunications traffic. You can’t listen in on those conduits the way you would on traffic passing through microwave relay towers.
The challenge of capturing messages carried by new communications technologies became especially acute for NSA after the debut of the Worldwide Web — roughly at the same time the Soviet Union was disappearing. Extremists of every stripe began turning to the Internet as their preferred means of sharing information, and the dot.com boom anticipated an explosion in demand for bandwidth by laying fiber anywhere money could conceivably be made.
So here’s the dilemma that NSA faced in the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. A new threat of apparently epic proportions had materialized that communicated using methods beyond the reach of traditional electronic-surveillance technology. Other agencies faced their own problems in trying to generate imagery and human intelligence about this elusive adversary, but for NSA the key question was whether it could find a way into the heartland of the new global telecommunications system — Internet service delivered via fiber.
NSA’s answer to this challenge is found in a series of top-secret charts about the agency’s PRISM program that the Washington Post published on June 6. One chart in particular observes that “Much of the world’s communications flow through the U.S.,” calling America the “World’s Telecommunications Backbone.” Noting that “A target’s phone call, email or chat will take the cheapest path” in the emerging global telecom system, the chart states that “Your target’s communications could easily be flowing into and through the U.S.”
An accompanying graphic demonstrated why that isn’t just possible but likely. Thanks partly to the fact that the U.S. invented the Internet and partly to the fact that the dot.com boom laid so much fiber, well over 80% of international bandwidth capacity for the Internet in 2011 led to and from the United States. So an email (or some portion thereof) originating in one of Karachi’s Internet cafes will often pass through a node in Silicon Valley or Northern Virginia en route to Yemen, because that’s how packet-switching operates in a network where most of the carrying capacity runs through the U.S.
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