The NSA doesn't care that your grandma fell in the garden and twisted her ankle

I've been thinking about how they would actually utilize phone records...

What would I do if I worked at the NSA and wanted to have indicators or "hot spots" of potential terrorism?


First off I would probably do some kind of overlay of the World, then you have to deal with 10s, 100s of billions of call detail records. It's a lot of data. Since we have these cool things called rate centers, I would probably organize the data by terminating/originating TN. Looking at calls between two US based TN would be fruitless, useless, and a waste of time. We would break up the international call legs by country code and drill down into local province codes, whatever numbering plan is specific to the foreign country.

Then let the software do it's magic. You have normal traffic patterns from international corporations, friends and family, etc. This is where it gets tricky. You need to be able to look for some type of abnormal traffic patterns like all of a sudden call volumes from Islamabad to Boise went up over past two weeks 800%. Since I'm sure they can do an LNP query we would know the owning carrier/service provider and we could even weight some networks/services as more suspect than others. For example, those throw-away 7-11 phones you can get without a contract. Once you start getting patterns of activities you look at the foreign source and start doing background on that individual/company and if needed get a FISA warrant for the US side.

Cool stuff right

One thing here people tend to forget is that our LEA are continually understaffed with interpreters. I happen to just know this from experience so you can take my word for it. If you think they have the people and resources to translate 100, even 50 calls real-time I've got some stock in Nortel to sell you