How can examining stats on phone usage say anything about terrorist

activity without monitoring the actual conversations taking place on those phones? The only information it may give is that everyone calls their mom's on Mother's Day.

that's really the only way that they could create 'the largest database in the world'. Simple records of who called who when and for how long couldn't form that DB.

Oh, no, we're only spying on international calls.......really........(busted) well, we don't LISTEN to them, we just have lists of times and numbers.......really....

Lying. Bush admin, lips moving=lying.

They're listening.

And I suspect this is why they have so little opposition; they know every single Dem's dealer, phone sex preference, preferred hotel to meet the other woman (or man) .......on and on......most of it is probably nothing anyone should give a damn about in a REAL free country, but political and personal murder if it were thrown out to the obliging press to brandish...

I was two degrees from rumsfeld around christmas day -- What does that mean? One person was in direct contact, and that person contacted another person who contacted me.

So exchange the R name with Terrorist.

From this you figure out who is talking to whom.

When you put together all the whos that are talking to whom you can construct networks of interacting individuals/telephones/emails.

In unsophisticated networks (sophisticated nets operate near maximum 24/7 using fake data just to keep the net busy)), the number of calls can be used to develop activity patterns (chatter). Changes in the activity pattern can be informational.

other activity patterns that show up on credit cards and such. Like banking and travel.

Your credit card use and banking records are as easily accessible by the feds. as your phone records.

Ultimately they are looking for the nexus between suspects/persons of interest and the networks.

that's why their excuses to justify it don't make sense.

snip:
To find meaningful patterns in transactional data, analysts need a lot of it. They must set baselines about what constitutes "normal" behavior versus "suspicious" activity. Administration officials have said that the NSA doesn't intercept the contents of a communication unless officials have a "reasonable" basis to conclude that at least one party is linked to a terrorist organization.

To make any reasonable determination like that, the agency needs hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of call records, preferably as soon as they are created, said a senior person in the defense industry who is familiar with the NSA program and is an expert in the analytical tools used to find patterns and connections. Asked if this means that the NSA program is much broader and less targeted than administration officials have described, the expert replied, "I think that's correct."

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002399.html

and another
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060511-6813

From teens to thirties, you get new numbers all the damn time. How do they know unless they are "monitoring"

Heck I still get a bunch of numbers if I'm out and about dating.

and I tend to agree.

...knowing more about the persons calling, and that, requires a warrant... Or used to anyway...

having a clue as to what is actually said. Particularly when it is linked to other data bases.

... So let's say I call my relatives in the Mid-East once or twice per day... I live in NJ, supposedly the capital of Muslim Extremists... So they track my call patterns and see the frequency in which I call from one "hot area" to another... Without knowing more about me, how does this help?

They have all your banking and credit card records. But that's beside the point.

The intelligence community has a list of "usual suspects" which is made up of persons or organizations. Your little family communications network may not have a nexus with a person or group of interest. As such it probably wouldn't be of much interest. But if your network did intersect with more than statistical randomness it would become of interest at least until it was assessed, and that may include what's being said in the net.

Signals intelligence on the routing information may work out network membership, hierarchical patterns (command control and routing hubs) within networks, and activity patterns, all without explicit knowledge of content. Aside from the information that's on a network, knowing the structure and activity of a netwokr is really important shit for operations types to know because then they can disrupt a network by knocking out a critical component of the network rather than by taking down every member individually.

These idiots are drunk with power and their own sense of self importance and ideological zeal. They are incapable of making good judgments-like any drunk. I don't trust them to chip away at my privacy rights, hell; I don't trust them to contract for limousine service. I say shut down NSA entirely.

Question: What has caused more harm--death, economic damage, erosion of liberty--to our country; the attacks on 9/11 (I so scared:scared:), or everything the Bush Regime has done in response to it?

or potential terrorists. They're looking for people who might just be able to stir an organized opposition to this administration. And for people who might have contacts that would help them be able to organize.

We're on the list simply because my husband's best friend growing up (in Holland) was recently elected to his town council on the Worker's Party (more socialist than the Labor party but less socialist than the Socialists) and mentioned that we had congratulated him on the town web site. We get phone calls from him and we call him in return...along with my husband's brother and aunts. You make or receive overseas calls, you're automatically suspect.

Go read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis .

Tesha

population.