The problem is that things quickly expand beyond the capability to do any actual analysis.

In a real investigation you track things down and eliminate the extraneous to concentrate on what’s important. These people don’t seem to be doing anything other than collecting data.

The main restriction on this type of work is the number of linguists, and they have not been training enough people to fill the minimum requirements of the two wars they have going on, much less to do any reasonable level of intelligence analysis.

of course they’re mining data. both data mining and data storage have become faster, easier, cheaper, and more sophisticated. but to do data mining, you need data. the slow, difficult, expensive part is still collecting the data and getting it into the digital pipeline somewhere.

telephony isn’t my area of expertise, but i’ll hazard some guesses here. wiretapping used to be difficult enough that its use could only be justified for surveillance of very likely targets. wiretapping has now become easy enough that collecting huge numbers of conversations now and wading through them later is feasible, or soon will be. the slowest and most difficult part of wiretapping is now, or soon will be, getting around the legal hurdles.

obeying the law, what a quaint concept.

I noticed the order of languages Urdu [Pakistan], Farsi [Iran], then Arabic. Of course he may not know the difference between Farsi and Dari, the Afghan version, but first of all the fact that the communications are in a foreign language would probably indicate to a judge that this was foreign intelligence making the warrant request easier to obtain.

Actually, if you get a warrant the private sector entities have total immunity and are required to provide access, plus you don’t have to ask Congress for anything. It’s one of the benefits of obeying the law.

i liked this, from the very next paragraph:
Q: How many calls? Thousands?
A: Don’t want to go there. Just think, lots. Too many.
too many? as in, they want to listen in on everybody else in the whole world? just in case?

he goes on:
Now the second part of the issue was under the president’s program, the terrorist surveillance program, the private sector had assisted us.
[sorry, couldn’t resist]

and on:
Because if you’re going to get access you’ve got to have a partner and they were being sued. Now if you play out the suits at the value they’re claimed, it would bankrupt these companies. So my position was we have to provide liability protection to these private sector entities.
hmmm, the government wants to protect corporations that conspire with the government in unlimited spying. given this administration’s propensity for flouting all the laws, we don’t need it suborning all the businesses too.

yeah, that signature process caught my eye too, but i’m thinking the process improvement that’s needed here isn’t in the getting of warrants, it’s the deciding which targets to focus on.