The Shadow Factory by James Bamford

Author:James Bamford
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780385528399
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2008-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

Transit

In addition to communications to and from the U.S., broad streams of telecommunications that transit the country are another key target of the NSA—calls and e-mails from one part of the world to another that simply pass through a U.S. switch. It is a greatly increasing phenomenon, making up about one-third of all communications entering and leaving the country, and one NSA has quietly been attempting to encourage. One of the agency’s “greatest advantages,” said Lieutenant General Keith B. Alexander, Hayden’s successor as director of the NSA, was “the ability to access a vast portion of the world’s communications infrastructure located in our own nation.”

The problem for Hayden was that although the people he was targeting were foreigners in a foreign country communicating with foreigners in another foreign country, because the signal was on a cable—a wire—the FISA court consistently ruled that he must first obtain a warrant. “The issue was international communications are on a wire,” said Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, “so all of a sudden we were in a position, because of the wording in the law, that we had to have a warrant to do that…Now if it were wireless, we would not be required to get a warrant…We haven’t done that in wireless [satellite communications] for years.” He added, “If Osama bin Laden in Pakistan call[ed] somebody in Singapore, and it passed through the United States, they had to have a warrant.” Indeed, today most domestic and international communications at one point pass through a wire, such as a buried or undersea fiber-optic cable.

McConnell gave a preview of the cumbersome process now required when foreign-to-foreign communication is intercepted over a cable. “It takes about two hundred man-hours to do one telephone number,” he said. “Think about it from the judges’ standpoint. ‘Well, is this foreign intelligence? Well, how do you know it’s foreign intelligence? Well, what does Abdul calling Mohammed mean, and how do I interpret that?’ So, it’s a very complex process. And now you’ve got to write it all up and it goes through the signature process, take it through the Justice Department, and take it down to the FISA court. So all that process is about two hundred man-hours for one number.”

One example might be a person in Tokyo sending an e-mail at three in the afternoon to someone in Beijing—a very busy, and expensive, time for the message to pass through an Asian switch. As a result, the ISP in Tokyo might instead automatically route all messages to Beijing at that hour via AT&T’s WorldNet switch in San Francisco, or one of its peering partners there. At ten in the evening West Coast time, the communications traffic in San Francisco would be greatly reduced, and thus lessen the chance for a delay. Also, the off-peak time would provide a significant price break. Because the communications travel at the speed of light, and since both Japan–U.S. and China–U.S. fiber-optic cables pass through the San Luis Obispo landing station, there would be no time delay caused by the extra ten thousand or so miles.

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