OFF THE WIRE
Philip Bump
As an aside during testimony on Capitol Hill today, a National Security
Agency representative rather casually indicated that the government
looks at data from a universe of far, far more people than previously
indicated.
Chris Inglis, the agency's deputy director, was one of several
government representatives—including from the FBI and the office of the
Director of National Intelligence—testifying before the House Judiciary
Committee this morning. Most of the testimony largely echoed previous testimony
by the agencies on the topic of the government's surveillance,
including a retread of the same offered examples for how the Patriot Act
and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act had stopped terror events.
But Inglis' statement was new. Analysts look "two or three hops" from
terror suspects when evaluating terror activity, Inglis
revealed. Previously, the limit of how surveillance was extended had been described
as two hops. This meant that if the NSA were following a phone metadata
or web trail from a terror suspect, it could also look at the calls
from the people that suspect has spoken with—one hop. And then, the
calls that second person had also spoken with—two hops. Terror suspect to person two to person three. Two hops. And now: A third hop.
Think of it this way. Let's say the government suspects you are a
terrorist and it has access to your Facebook account. If you're an
American citizen, it can't do that currently (with certain exceptions)—but
for the sake of argument. So all of your friends, that's one hop. Your
friends' friends, whether you know them or not—two hops. Your friends'
friends' friends, whoever they happen to be, are that third hop. That's a
massive group of people that the NSA apparently considers fair game.
For a sense of scale, researchers at the University of Milan found in 2011 that everyone on the Internet was, on average, 4.74 steps away from anyone else. The NSA explores relationships up to three of those steps. (See our conversation with the ACLU's Alex Abdo on this.)
Inglis' admission didn't register among the members of Congress
present, but immediately resonated with privacy advocates online.