National Security Agency Analysis

The first major incident that alerted the United States to the threat of terrorism on its own soil was the bombing in the garage section of the world trade center in 1993. This sparked a surge amongst the nation’s intelligence organizations to go after suspected future threats. This paper will focus on the national security agency’s transition into the digital era and the tools it uses to prop up its unrestricted global surveillance network.
By the late-1990s William Binney, a veteran at the NSA’s was widely regarded as its most talented codebreakers/analysts ever. He was tasked with coming up with a technical solution to filter through massive amounts of data to gain intelligence on who the terrorists were and what their plots were. His background as a codebreaker during the Vietnam war lead him to realize that sometimes even more information could be gained by looking at how data related to other data on a macro scale rather than looking at the specific information within a piece of data; this is essentially the concept of metadata. Bill’s leverage of metadata analysis first proved its legitimacy when he was able to accurately predict the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.1

Binney along with the assistance of many others in the agency were attempting to create a program that could map the relationships between every human being in the world.

Binney co-founded a group within the NSA call SARC (Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center) to accomplish this goal.7 They used people’s digital footprints with one another; things like: text messages, phone calls, geo tags, emails, flights, and transactions. All of this information gets transmitted through phones, computers, credit cards, and other such devices. Again, rather than looking at the actual data of an individual they looked at the relationships between one person’s data and other. This program would implement these features, and would go on to be called “Thin

Thread”.
With the growing database that was in the scale of trillions of pieces of data, Bill and his colleagues became concerned with the privacy of everyone they were collecting this information on. Particularly those who hadn’t done or weren’t planning on doing anything illegal.2 They implemented several safeguards to protect against this potential massive abuse of privacy rights. Encryptions were built in to prevent the developers from knowing who any of the data belonged to. Only certain areas were labeled as “zones of suspicion”, people outside of these zones did have their data collected at all.2 A filtering tool was also used to exclude any American citizen or organization in America unless they were specifically targeted; even then a warrant would be required to reveal the identity of an individual.2 By late 2000 the program was fully operational.
In 1999 Michael Hayden was appointed as the new director of the NSA.2 He created the NSA transformation office (NTO) to assist the organization with the necessary changes it needed to make in order to keep up with the modernization of the digital world. Impressed with what they had accomplished, The NTO offered the Thin Thread team a staggering 1.2-billion-dollar budget to help bolster the program. Up until this point the total operating budget was only three million dollars.3 After internal deliberations, the Thin Thread team responded that at most they would only need 300 million dollars to scale up the program further. Hayden seemingly unhappy with SARC team and the NTO agent (who would soon lose his job) decided to start a new project called “Trailblazer”.4 The development of which would be primarily outsourced to contractors. By 2006, Trailblazer was retired and considered a failure; by that point well over a billion dollars had been put into it.3