The NSA is Spying pt. 2: The Gloomier - The Science They Don't Want You to Know

Hello internet, and welcome to The Science They Don't Want You to Know.  As I have mentioned in the first post of this series, I am doing research regarding the statistical viability of currently unconfirmed conspiracies (no leaked documents) by way of currently known conspiracies (documents have been leaked).  The primary purpose of this initial research is to gather particular information, specifically how many people were involved in the actual conspiracies and the length of time which these conspiracies took place.  If you have not read the first post, you should read it here.  For NSA part one of this post, it'll be found here.

If you'll recall last time, I was talking about how the Patriot act allowed the NSA to tap into the phone calls and emails during the Bush administration.  I covered the fact that this does not technically fall under the fourth amendment because conversations do not fall under the legal definition of property.  I left off last time with the FISA court telling the NSA that they have to get a warrant for every phone call and email which they collect data.  That should have been the end of the story, since Obama couldn't honestly use the line that Bush did about the legality of the NSA spying on the American population.

But in 2013, Edward Snowden leaked classified documents from the NSA about Project PRISM, and the Guardian was the first to reveal the story.  These files show that the NSA has still been performing mass surveillance on the Domestic front without warrants since 2007, which you'll notice is the opposite of what the FISA court dictated in the March 2009 ruling.  President Obama said in response to this that the NSA wasn't "listening to our conversations", just "collecting meta-data".  We don't have the documentation or the surveillance to confirm or deny his claims, so we cannot assume that he's lying.  Then-President Bush did the same thing, even as he had less of an understanding of what "meta-data" means.

The logic behind this surveillance without a warrant is that the information itself exited US Borders and entered again.  So while both ends of the communication was wholly within the United States, the information packets used to get the information from point A to Point B (both being in the US) travelled outside the United States.

These documents also show that a number of internet companies were involved in the program called PRISM, including Microsoft, Google, and Facebook.  The mechanism for the collection of these data which the NSA claims makes this a legal operation, is that the information which collects physically leaves the borders of the United States, than reenters the country, and the fact that it "enters from a geographically exterior location" makes it legal for collection, even as the sender and the recipient both are well within the borders of the United States.

So now we have both the start point and the end point, and now we have a time frame of this conspiracy.  That is, of course, assuming that the NSA is no longer spying on Americans without warrants.  As we know, that may not be the case, but assuming that it is the case, this conspiracy covers 11.5 years, from the day the Patriot Act was made into law to the day Snowden released the files relating to this case.

We just need a number for how many people were involved in this conspiracy.  It is safe to assume that everyone in the NSA headquarters worked to collect these data, even for a few cases, since it involves the collection of so many emails and phone calls.  It also must involve those at the very top of the companies involved, who knowingly participated in such activities.  There may have been technicians who did a little bit of coding which allowed the mechanism for data leaving and reentering the borders of America, but it is also safe to assume that these technicians didn't know why these codes were being written, either through lie or omission.  

What's the final number that would make this good for statistical analysis?  In a power point presentation, it was revealed that the number of employees were "more than 30,000 demographically

diverse men and women located at NSA headquarters in Ft. Meade, MD".  There is an interview where Ambassador John D. Negroponte Director of National Intelligence mentioned that "[...] with an Intelligence Community of close to 100,000 individuals across 16 agencies [...]", so one would think that this is the number we would use to approximate the value we want.  This would be wrong, because the NSA is one of the 16 intelligence agencies referenced, so the NSA would have less than  the quoted "close to 100,000 individuals".  So the number which we will use to make the approximation is the "more than 30,000 [individuals]".  Since it's "more than" 30,000, and there are agents external to the NSA involved, we can loosely justify a number of 31,000 for our figures.

If you remember the first post in this series, the point of obtaining those numbers is to get statistical values in order to find the statistical likelihood of supposed conspiracies.  Putting these numbers through the statistical machinery, it is seen that the probability of failure per person per year of the NSA spying on us is 2.0054E-04%.  This gives us a statistical average for the per-person-per-year failure rate of 1.6529E-04%.  Now, if it turns out that the NSA is still spying on us -- which I wouldn't doubt, seeing as they have been during the first two presidencies since the 9-11 attacks -- these statistical values will change on us.  Remember that these are the numbers for the known situations to date.

So until next time, take that as you will.
K. "Alan" Eister Δαβ

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