The government could be building a giant map of social networks using Facebook and Twitter, scraping MySpace pages, or mining the metadata associated with cellular phone calls in order to look for communication patterns. On the other hand, all of that computer power that the NSA is aggregating at the datacenters that are coming online could just be for the limited purpose of snooping voice calls and e-mail coming into and out of the US, but such narrow use is unlikely.�

What the NSA is doing with its massive and growing capabilities is still a secret, but it's probably an extension of DoD efforts at mapping social networks that extend back to the early part of the decade. A new EFF lawsuit filed this week could finally shed at least a little more light on the nature of these classified activities, so that we can know for sure whether some descendent of John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness program lives on at the NSA.

Earlier this month, the EFF filed a Freedom of Information Act request that sought to obtain the mandatory oversight records that agencies in-the-loop on these secret activities would have had to file—records that, at the very least, would indicate whether the filing agency thought these activities were legal. The government has refused to produce the relevant records, so yesterday the EFF announced that it's suing the government to get the administration to comply with the FOIA.

"By executive order, federal intelligence agencies must submit concerns about potentially illegal activity to the Intelligence Oversight Board and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence," EFF Open Government Legal Fellow Nate Cardozo said in a statement. "Intelligence agencies are given a wide berth for national security reasons, but at a minimum they're required to act within the limits of the law. These records hold important details about how well the Executive Branch's internal checks operate."

In refusing to produce the records, the Obama administration is claiming a FOIA exemption for national security reasons. But, if the acts covered in the requested documents are illegal, then this rationale won't work. "You can't claim a national security exemption for illegal acts," EFF Open Government Legal Fellow Nate Cardozo told Ars. So the EFF wants to get a judge to at least look over the documents in order to determine if they describe illegal acts because, if they do, then they'll have to be handed over to the EFF.

Since Congress doesn't know and doesn't apparently care if the NSA is doing that would've been illegal before they amended FISA last year to authorize it, the Intelligence Oversight Board is our only hope of finding out what's going on. "If Congress has been kept in the dark," Cardozo told Ars, "then the IOB is really it. So the lawsuit is intended to figure out if the executive branch's oversight machinery is functioning smoothly."

The NSA was doing social networking before MySpace

As mentioned above, NSA is probably crawling the sudden explosion of social networking tools, making links between individuals and using data-mining technologies to construct elaborate maps of who associate with whom. This may seem like a wild allegation, but we know that the Department of Defense (of which the NSA is a part) was exploring exactly this sort of social network mapping under the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program that was uncovered not long after 9/11.

The DoD wanted to use communications metadata—essentially, the records that the phone company keeps of who talked to whom and when—to try to build maps of social networks well before users began building them themselves using tools like Facebook and Twitter. The idea is that if you can link everyone in a giant social network, then you can identify pockets of suspected terrorists by first catching just one small fish and then surveilling his entire network until you've identified a terrorist cell.

As we pointed out in our�initial coverage of the 2005 wiretapping story when the NYT broke it, TIA was uncovered in 2002 and shut down by Congress in early 2003. That was not long after the president had signed an executive order authorizing new surveillance powers for the NSA under the heading of the Presidential Surveillance Program. The TIA itself was just a rebranding of an earlier program, and similar data mining efforts have been popping up around the executive branch (DoD, DHS, TSA) under different codenames for the past decade.

Of course, it's not certain that one of these data mining efforts is, in fact, going on under the heading of the now-legal PSP. It's possible that the DoD could have just given up on its data mining ambitions. I suppose one could imagine that, in the wake of 9/11, at the height of the war on terror with the invasion of Iraq looming, the NSA looked at the datamining capabilities that other agencies like DHS and TIA were developing and said, "no thanks... we'll just stick to monitoring communications where at least one endpoint is outside the US."

But given everything that has been uncovered in bits and pieces over the years (see Further Reading, below), it seems warranted to speculate that the mysterious Other Intelligence Activities referenced in the recent OIG report (see our coverage here and here) include some type of datamining program that takes in data from the Internet and from voice networks in order to build maps and models of social networks. And, given that there is a ton of social network data now freely available on the Web for anyone who wants to scrape and compile it, I have a hard time believing that the NSA would ignore all of that.

Further reading

For more detail on TIA and the kinds of things that are probably included in the NSA's Other Intelligence Activities, see the links below.

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