[Leica] Re: NSA phone contact analysis

[lrzeitlin at optonline.net (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

On May 19, 2006, at 10:01 AM, Gene wrote:

> In a message dated 5/18/2006 9:47:59 AM Central Daylight Time,
> lrzeitlin@optonline.net writes:
> Still, I don't want the NSA monitoring my telephone calls.
>
>
> Larry, it is all done by computer and only over the air.  Unless you 
> are
> trafficking in terror or other types of communications along that line 
> they (NSA)
> will never even look at your phone number.  they are too far under 
> manned and
> have much more inmportant thigs to do.  The media and the opposing 
> political
> groups are blowing this all out of proportion.
>
> Gene
>

Gene,

As I understand it, the NSA uses a modification the social networking 
technique, a tried and true method of finding the dominant figures in a 
group. It has been used in the analysis of businesses, children's play 
groups, political organizations, etc. for at least 50 years. One simply 
keeps track of the originators and receivers of communication and 
assembles all the communication paths into a matrix or diagram. 
Generally the dominant figures of a group are those to whom most 
communication paths lead. These need not be the highest ranking members 
of the group, but, because they are the nexus of communication, they 
have an influence disproportionate to their status. In business, the 
boss's secretary is often in this position. In 1965 I participated in 
designing the interior of the late lamented World Trade Center. We used 
the networking technique, aided and abetted by the New York Port 
Authority  internal phone records, to locate offices so that people who 
needed to talk to each other often would be in adjoining locations. We 
did find a few anomalies. There was a high volume of calls to a phone 
number in New Jersey. Apparently a bookie had an agent in the Port 
Authority who was taking bets from PONYA employees.

The difficulty with network analysis is that the volume of possible 
interactions rises exponentially as the number of participants 
increases. We found that trying to keep track of 13,000 telephone sites 
taxed the capability of our, then state of the art, IBM 360 computer. 
There are over 200,000,000 telephones in the USA today. The NSA has a 
daunting task. I don't know of any computer system that can do more 
than a cursory job of plotting all the data. Forget about listening in. 
There aren't enough ears in the world to do that.

I agree that the whole thing has been blown out of proportion. Still, I 
feel uneasy about anyone tracking my calls to my bookie or seeing which 
web sites I log onto. And just to appease the LUG police, I took most 
of the pictures of the WTC interiors with my trusty 1954 Leica M3 with 
a collapsible F2.0, 50 mm Summicron, a bugeyed 35 mm Summaron, and a 
collapsible 90 mm Elmar. I still have the camera and lenses. They 
lasted longer than the building.

Larry Z