The Numerati by Stephen Baker

Author:Stephen Baker [Baker, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (www.hmhco.com)

Chapter 5

Terrorist

A SCHOOL BUS pulls up beside my car. Kids stream out and make their noisy way into the National Cryptologic Museum in Fort Meade, Maryland—my destination as well. I'm a little early. Just across a broad avenue, beyond an imposing hightech fence and a vast acreage of parking space, stands the country's headquarters of electronic espionage, the National Security Agency. I recognize the black, glass-walled cubes of the NSA from a refrigerator magnet a friend gave me a couple of years ago. It shows a bolt of lightning shooting down through the purple evening sky onto the taller of the two buildings. It appears either to be smiting the secretive workshop or imbuing it with righteous force from above, depending on your perspective. I'm here for a talk with the NSA's chief mathematician, James Schatz. It's apparently a lot easier for him to cross the street to this little museum than for me to get security clearance and make my way into the NSA fortress.

The NSA was at the center of the information war on terrorism long before 9/11. But the profile of the secretive spy agency rose following the attacks. It became all too clear that the United States lacked on-the-ground intelligence in the war against Al Qaeda. Most spies and special forces in the Mideast struggled even to make a phone call in Arabic. Few could hope to infiltrate the terror network, much less locate and capture Osama bin Laden. The answer to this shortage, for many, was to comb through digital data. "It will be their sons against our silicon," wrote Peter Huber and Fred Mills of ICX Technology, a high-tech surveillance company, in the winter of 2002.

What sorts of data would fuel the hunt for terrorists? Practically anything the government could get its hands on. In the years following 9/11, the government spent more than $1 billion to merge its enormous databases, including those of the FBI and the CIA. This would give data miners a single unified resource. But that wasn't all. They would also trawl oceans of consumer and demographic details, airline records and hotel receipts, along with videos, photos, and millions of hours of international phone and Internet traffic harvested by the NSA. This trove matched anything that the Web giants Yahoo and Google were grappling with. In May 2006, news surfaced that the NSA was secretly extending its nets even further. USA Today reported that major phone companies had delivered hundreds of billions of phone records to the government. These provided details on who was calling whom, from where, for how long, and whether the call was forwarded. Were the NSA staff also listening in on the calls and reading the e-mails? There was no telling. But the Bush administration made clear that when it came to antiterrorism efforts, few legalities involving congressional disclosure or court approval should get in the way. Consequently, the details of our lives flow into those databases, and it's up to government data miners to weed out the terrorists among us.

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