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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/magazine/312wwln_essay.html?_r=1&oref=
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From today's NYTimes Magazine....

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March 12, 2006
Idea Lab
 
By PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE


Recent debates about the National Security Agency's
warrantless-eavesdropping program have produced two very different
pictures of the operation. Whereas administration officials describe a
carefully aimed "terrorist surveillance program," press reports depict a
pervasive electronic net ensnaring thousands of innocent people and few
actual terrorists. Could it be that both the administration and its
critics are right? One way to reconcile these divergent accounts - and
explain the administration's decision not to seek warrants for the
surveillance - is to examine a new conceptual paradigm that is changing
how America's spies pursue terrorists: network theory.

During the last decade, mathematicians, physicists and sociologists have
advanced the scientific study of networks, identifying surprising
commonalities among the ways airlines route their flights, people
interact at cocktail parties and crickets synchronize their chirps. In
the increasingly popular language of network theory, individuals are
"nodes," and relationships and interactions form the "links" binding
them together; by mapping those connections, network scientists try to
expose patterns that might not otherwise be apparent. Researchers are
applying newly devised algorithms to vast databases - one academic team
recently examined the e-mail traffic of 43,000 people at a large
university and mapped their social ties. Given the difficulty of
identifying elusive terror cells, it was only a matter of time before
this new science was discovered by America's spies.

In its simplest form, network theory is about connecting the dots.
Stanley Milgram's finding that any two Americans are connected by a mere
six intermediaries - or "degrees of separation" - is one of the
animating ideas behind the science of networks; the Notre Dame physicist
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi studied one obvious network - the Internet - and
found that any two unrelated Web pages are separated by only 19 links.
After Sept. 11, Valdis Krebs, a Cleveland consultant who produces social
network "maps" for corporate and nonprofit clients, decided to map the
hijackers. He started with two of the plotters, Khalid al-Midhar and
Nawaf Alhazmi, and, using press accounts, produced a chart of the
interconnections - shared addresses, telephone numbers, even
frequent-flier numbers - within the group. All of the 19 hijackers were
tied to one another by just a few links, and a disproportionate number
of links converged on the leader, Mohamed Atta. Shortly after posting
his map online, Krebs was invited to Washington to brief intelligence
contractors.

Announced in 2002, Adm. John Poindexter's controversial Total
Information Awareness program was an early effort to mine large volumes
of data for hidden connections. But even before 9/11, an Army project
called Able Danger sought to map Al Qaeda by "identifying linkages and
patterns in large volumes of data," and may have succeeded in
identifying Atta as a suspect. As if to underline the project's
social-network principles, Able Danger analysts called it "the Kevin
Bacon game."

Given that the N.S.A. intercepts some 650 million communications
worldwide every day, it's not surprising that its analysts focus on a
question well suited to network theory: whom should we listen to in the
first place? Russell Tice, a former N.S.A. employee who worked on highly
classified Special Access Programs, says that analysts start with a
suspect and "spider-web" outward, looking at everyone he contacts, and
everyone those people contact, until the list includes thousands of
names. Officials familiar with the program have said that before
individuals are actually wiretapped, computers sort through flows of
metadata - information about who is contacting whom by phone or e-mail.
An unclassified National Science Foundation report says that one tool
analysts use to sort through all that data is link analysis. 

The use of such network-based analysis may explain the administration's
decision, shortly after 9/11, to circumvent the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court. The court grants warrants on a case-by-case basis,
authorizing comprehensive surveillance of specific individuals. The
N.S.A. program, which enjoys backdoor access to America's major
communications switches, appears to do just the opposite: the
surveillance is typically much less intrusive than what a FISA warrant
would permit, but it involves vast numbers of people.

In some ways, this is much less alarming than old-fashioned wiretapping.
A computer that monitors the metadata of your phone calls and e-mail to
see if you talk to terrorists will learn less about you than a
government agent listening in to the words you speak. The problem is
that most of us are connected by two degrees of separation to thousands
of people, and by three degrees to hundreds of thousands. This explains
reports that the overwhelming number of leads generated by the N.S.A.
program have been false positives - innocent civilians implicated in an
ever-expanding associational web.

This has troubling implications for civil liberties. But it also points
to a practical obstacle for using link analysis to discover terror
networks: information overload. The National Counterterrorism Center's
database of suspected terrorists contains 325,000 names; the
Congressional Research Service recently found that the N.S.A. is at risk
of being drowned in information. Able Danger analysts produced link
charts identifying suspected Qaeda figures, but some charts were 20 feet
long and covered in small print. If Atta's name was on one of those
network maps, it could just as easily illustrate their ineffectiveness
as it could their value, because nobody pursued him at the time.

One way to make sense of these volumes of information is to look for
network hubs. When Barabasi mapped the Internet, he found that sites
like Google and Yahoo operate as hubs - much like an airline hub at
Newark or O'Hare - maintaining exponentially more links than the
average. The question is how to identify the hubs in an endless flow of
records and intercepted communications. Scientists are using algorithms
that can determine the "role structure" within a network: what are the
logistical and hierarchical relationships, who are the hubs? The process
involves more than just tallying links. If you examined the metadata for
all e-mail traffic at a university, for instance, you might find an
individual who e-mailed almost everyone else every day. But rather than
being an especially connected or charismatic leader, this individual
could turn out to be an administrator in charge of distributing
announcements. Another important concept in network theory is the
"strength of weak ties": the most valuable information may be exchanged
by actors from otherwise unrelated social networks.

Network academics caution that the field is still in its infancy and
should not be regarded as a panacea. Duncan Watts of Columbia University
points out that it's much easier to trace a network when you can already
identify some of its members. But much social-network research involves
simply trawling large databases for telltale behaviors or activities
that might be typical of a terrorist. In this case the links among
people are not based on actual relationships at all, but on an
"affiliation network," in which individuals are connected by virtue of
taking part in a similar activity. This sort of approach has been
effective for corporations in detecting fraud. A credit-card company
knows that when someone uses a card to purchase $2 of gas at a gas
station, and then 20 minutes later makes an expensive purchase at an
electronics store, there's a high probability that the card has been
stolen. Marc Sageman, a former C.I.A. case officer who wrote a book on
terror networks, notes that correlating certain signature behaviors
could be one way of tracking terrorists: jihadist groups in Virginia and
Australia exercised at paint-ball courses, so analysts could look for
Muslim militants who play paint ball, he suggests. But whereas there is
a long history of signature behaviors that indicate fraud, jihadist
terror networks are a relatively new phenomena and offer fewer reliable
patterns.

There is also some doubt that identifying hubs will do much good.
Networks are by their very nature robust and resistant to attack. After
all, while numerous high ranking Qaeda leaders have been captured or
killed in the years since Sept. 11, the network still appears to be
functioning. "If you shoot the C.E.O., they'll hire another one," Duncan
Watts says. "The job will still get done." 

Patrick Radden Keefe, a Century Foundation fellow, is the author of
"Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping."



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