NSA Wiretap Program Uses Innovative Router-Sniffing Spy Dogs
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Temporally realigned by admin on 2006/2/10 9:47:32 (200 reads)
By Ion Zwitter, Avant News Editor
Fort Meade, Maryland, August 12, 2006
With all the controversy surrounding President Bush's illegal NSA
(National Security Agency) wiretap surveillance program, some of the
benefits and the remarkable technological successes brought into being
by the admittedly unconstitutional operation can be easily overlooked.
One of these unheralded achievements carries attributes that many will
find surprising: namely, four legs and a tail. Meet Mother, the NSA's
router-sniffing spy dog.
A highly trained "Riesenschnoodle", Mother is a specially bred cross
between the powerful, calm Riesenschnauzer and the intelligent,
high-strung King Poodle. From his first few months of life (Mother,
despite the name, is a male dog) Mother has been trained to sniff out
potentially threatening telephone and email communications.
Now five years old, Mother and nearly 5,000 other keen-nosed
Riesenschnoodles, all named Mother, have been stationed by the NSA at
major telecommunications junctions and data transmission hubs
nationwide, sniffing communications to protect America.
"It's an amazing program, and the Mothers are all amazing animals,"
said Lucky Marbles, a chief wrangler on the NSA's WOOF (Wiretaps
Overseeing Our Freedom) program. "They're quiet, obedient, noble
animals and all perfectly house-trained.
We've had very few complaints from telephone operators about, er,
accidents. Although Baltimore was blacked out for about three hours
last year when one of the Mothers decided to mark his territory on a
primary service transformer."
Mother, one of 5,000 router-sniffing spy dogs in the NSA's WOOF
programAccording to Mr. Marbles, the NSA's WOOF program provides a
"first line of defense" against potential terrorist acts planned via
unencrypted telephone and email communications to and from the United
States.
Similar to the bomb- and drug-sniffing dogs used by intelligence and
law enforcement agencies worldwide, the dogs of the NSA's WOOF program
can identify potentially threatening voice and email activity using
only their innate canine intelligence and an extremely sensitive nose.
"We have Mothers stationed at every major telephone exchange and
internet hub in America. Twenty-four hours a day, excepting for a few
breaks for walks and mealtimes, these dogs sit and sniff electronic
communications passing through routers and telecommunications
junctions.
When they detect evidence of a potential terrorist plot, they bark.
That flags that sequence of communications for further investigation by
the NSA."
According to Mr. Marbles, the 5,000 Mothers each bark over 200 times
per day on average, thereby flagging over one million individual
American telephone conversations or suspect emails for further
investigation.
He stressed that the dogs have been trained to differentiate "as best
they can" between domestic and international phone calls and email
transmissions, in part by using their impressive hearing ability to
detect minute differences in frequency modulation.
As the WOOF program has only been operating for "less than five years",
Mr. Marbles said, it is still too early to judge the overall success
rate due to "limited conclusive operational intelligence."
Evidence presented at the ongoing congressional hearings shows the WOOF
program has in fact resulted in zero arrests and no evidence of any
terrorist plots thus far. Nonetheless, he was optimistic about WOOF's
potential.
"Despite the unfortunate lack of evidence, I do believe that a great
many lives have been saved because of what we've been able to do with
this program," Mr. Marbles said. "I'm saying this program has produced
intelligence for us that has been very valuable in the global war on
terror -- both in terms of saving lives and breaking up plots directed
at the United States.
It has been a very useful source of intelligence for us, and we need to
continue the program."
"Admittedly, every lead the program has produced has been a dead end
- just innocent Americans going about their
constitutionally-protected private personal business," he said.
"Sometimes dogs just bark. But you can't make dog food without grinding
up a few dead animals, I always say."
"I'm not particularly worried about whether what we're doing is legal
or not," Mr. Marbles continued, "even though it obviously violates the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the law created to
prevent people like Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover from doing exactly the
same thing.
But President Bush ordered it, and it's my job to do what the president
tells me to do. It's up to him and his Attorney General, I guess, to
decide when laws and the Constitution don't apply."
source:
http://www.avantnews.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=246
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Mmm...looks like someone is getting tired of all this eavesdropping
chitchat : ) :)
Tetrascanner
Received on Sat Mar 02 2024 - 00:57:28 CST