As any public health person knows, mass screening tests need to be very sensitive to be economical. So, a screening for a disease (e.g. HIV) has two phases. The first, cheap, phase is oversensitive, on the theory that we don't want to miss anybody who IS positive (we don't want false negative results). We are wlling to accept a higher rate of false positive results to get this.
BUT, any ethical public health person will also tell you that you can't just assume people are positive based on the first test, you also have to do the much more costly second test BEFORE you tell people that they're HIV positive.

You know the genuises at the puzzle palace understand this two phase testing system, and probably have designed mass screening of phone calls to have these two phases. But, given the disregard for the law that the Bush regime is showing, you wonder whether they are ethical enough to actually do the second phase, or whether they're catching lots of people in a well-designed but poorly carried out dragnet.

You wish they had some kind of independent review, like the FISA court.

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The NSA started a project called Trailblazer (from an article by Siobhan Gorman of the Baltimore Sun) which was supposed to "sift through an ocean of modern-day digital communications and uncover key nuggets to protect the nation against an ever-changing collection of enemies." Mr. Gorman was on the trail of a $1.2 billion 'boondoggle' in the NSA. But the article gives some ideas of why the project failed.

Basically, the NSA is tapping all communication links it can and is recording everything for a while. As the data streams by, it is analyzed by an artificial intelligence (AI) program that is trained to look for key words, key phrases, encryption, Farsi, Arabic, etc. When it makes a hit, the program diverts that particular stream to another program that tries to make sense of the data according to the parameters given by its human controllers. This program tries to convert the data into information that is understandable to humans. This could mean tying together a string of words into a complete sentence, translating a foreign language, or decrypting a coded message. The problem for the NSA is these programs do not work, yet (after 6 years of trying). So, the NSA is having to fall back on older techniques, namely, reading the output of the first program with the Mark I human eyeball and using the Mark I human brain to figure out whether the first program caught a reference to making and exploding a bomb or a reference that a local high school play was bombed by its critics. That sentence above would be pulled by the first program and some poor NSA snooper is reading it and wishing he/she was doing something more productive.

Now, combine this with another news report on CNN about disgruntled FBI agents complaining about tracking down large numbers of phone numbers and making background checks on names provided by the NSA. This indicates the NSA has to examine a lot of data that is not very "cleaned up". There is a very good chance the stonewalling by the White House is to save themselves a lot of embarrassment of a failed "super snooper" and the fact that NSA operatives are going through everyone’s communications. That is why they could not go to FISA because it is too wide ranging and very little probable cause. And I found it a bit amusing that with all that snooping, the White House can come up with only one case of stopping a possible attack.

If the above can be proven in a court, Bush will be impeached and convicted by July 2007.

PS: Anyone using Pretty Good Privacy encryption software on their email could evade the NSA dragnet until long after they have completed their mission. And PGP has been available on the open market for over 10 years. So, this is one big sorry mess.

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