THE DUMBING DOWN OF U.S. INTELLIGENCE

 

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
THE DUMBING DOWN OF U.S. INTELLIGENCE
L. GORDON CROVITZ

FBI Director James Comey warned last week that the American Islamists who tried to assassinate free-speech advocates at a cartoon exhibition near Dallas are not alone. There are “hundreds, maybe thousands” of potential terrorists in the U.S. being inspired by overseas groups. “The haystack is the entire country,” he said. “We are looking for the needles, but increasingly the needles are unavailable to us.”

The needles will be even harder to find if Congress weakens the Patriot Act by reducing the intelligence available to national security. With the rise of Islamic State and its global recruiting tools, intelligence agencies should be allowed to join the “big data” revolution.

Edward Snowden’s data theft raised privacy alarms, but by now it’s clear no one working for the National Security Agency leaked confidential data other than Snowden himself. He evaded the 300 lawyers and compliance officers who monitor how NSA staff use data.

President Obama last year recalled how the 9/11 hijackers escaped detection because laws prohibited the NSA from gathering and connecting the dots. He explained that the Patriot Act was passed to “address a gap identified after 9/11” by having intelligence agencies collect anonymous metadata—date, time and duration—of phone calls.

But Mr. Obama reversed himself and now wants to gut the program. Instead of the NSA gathering call information, phone companies would hold the data. With multiple, unconnected databases, the NSA would no longer be able to access data to mine. There wouldn’t be dots to connect to threats. As for privacy, the phone companies’ databases would be less secure than the NSA’s.

Lawmakers will decide this month whether to extend the Patriot Act or to water it down. Instead they should update it to maximize both privacy and intelligence. Technology now has the answer, if only politicians will get out of the way.

Recent innovations in big data allow staggering amounts of information to be collected and mined. These data deliver correlations based on an individually anonymous basis. This work was originally done to support the chief revenue engine of the Internet, advertising. The technology generates increasingly targeted marketing messages based on individuals’ online activities.

The techniques have other applications. Google used them to become better than the Centers for Disease Control at predicting flu outbreaks by monitoring search terms like “flu medicine” by location. Canadian researchers studied thousands of premature babies and identified symptoms that precede fevers. Cities apply predictive policing by mining online data to assign cops where they’re needed.

The fast shift to self-driving cars is possible because of data transmitted among vehicles. Small drones share data that keep them from crashing into one another. A Brown University researcher discovered how banks could use metadata about people’s cell phone usage to determine their creditworthiness.

The Patriot Act was written in 2001, before any of these advances. It lets the NSA keep anonymous data about who is calling whom for five years, but it isn’t able to apply algorithms to find suspicious patterns. Analysts may examine call logs for suspicious links only if there is a pre-existing “reasonable, articulable suspicion” of terrorism or another threat to national security. There were 170 such searches last year.

Before the Snowden leaks two years ago, intelligence agencies had planned to ask Congress to broaden their access to anonymous data so they could use modern tools of big data. Technology has moved far ahead, leaving intelligence-gathering stupider.

A measure of how far behind the technology curve the intelligence agencies have become is that one of the would-be cartoon killers posted a message on Twitter beforehand with the hasthtag #TexasAttack. Law enforcement didn’t spot it until after the attack. In contrast, algorithms for delivering advertising parse signals such as hashtags to deliver relevant ads in real time, before the online page loads.

In their 2013 book, “Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think,” Viktor Mayer-Schönberger andKenneth Cukier describe the history of information: “As centuries passed, we opted for more information flows rather than less, and to guard against its excesses not primarily through censorship but through rules that limited the misuse of information.”

Congress should insist that the NSA ensure its data are used properly—no more Snowdens—but also give the agency authority to catch up to how the private sector uses data. Politicians should update the Patriot Act by permitting the intelligent use of data to prevent terrorism.

 

 

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