NSA Phone Records Kerfuffle Shows Flawed Intelligence Culture

Rarely would one expect a reporter at USA Today to break a major story, but last week, one did. It seems that the National Security Agency has secured the phone records of millions of Americans and is using its computing power to determine possible terrorist links by analyzing the traffic patterns. The debate rages as to whether this is wise or legal, but it illustrates the main failing of American intelligence, an excessive reliance on machines.

The NSA has a budget many times larger than the CIA’s, yet has managed to keep such a low profile that its unofficial nickname is “No Such Agency.” The NSA has the most sophisticated computers in the world and is responsible to tracking all the communications it can get its hands on (at least outside the US, but lately, inside as well). When the NSA requested phone records of tens of millions of Americans, it was within its customary field even if it was skating on thin legal ice.

When the NSA asked, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth turned records over; Qwest didn’t, and if the NSA really thought it was on solid legal ground, it would have forced Qwest to cooperate. So, the ACLU lawsuit that is coming will be fun to watch. Coming on the heels of the warrantless wiretapping, this merely extends the impression that the Bush administration is out of control.

That said, though, the situation is much more serious than just a White House that hasn’t got a clue what it’s doing (although that is pretty bad). The situation shows that the American intelligence community continues to try using machines when it really needs to use people. In order to find possible terrorists in the US (who may be as real as weapons of mass destruction in Iraq), the NSA is feeding all the phone calls made into the machine and looking for “suspicious” patterns. In order to find a few, the privacy of most Americans is at risk.

Yet, if one is to find US-based terrorists, human beings would prove more effective. Properly placed where the NSA, CIA, DIA and the rest of the alphabet soup of American intelligence thinks the opposition could be, a human being can identify, interact with, and infiltrate a terrorist cell. That would lead to disruption and a very real victory. The use of the NSA to crunch phone records suggests that the spooks don’t even know where to look, and they don’t know where to look because they don’t know the enemy. Americans don’t speak the right languages (America-English only please), haven’t studied the right cultures (or any for that matter), and have not made it a priority to fix that four and a half years after the attacks on lower Manhattan and northern Virginia. Machines are incredibly useful at doing the mundane things so that people can do the more intricate and difficult; the steam drill beat John Henry at laying down train tracks, but only a human can drive a train safely. America’s intelligence community appears to have only half the equation solved.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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