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ThinThread
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ThinThread is the name of a project that the United States National Security Agency engaged in during the 1990s, according to a May 17, 2006 article in the Baltimore Sun. The program involved wiretapping and sophisticated analysis of the resulting data, but according to the article, the program was discontinued after the September 11, 2001 attacks due to the changes in priorities and the consolidation of U.S. intelligence authority.
According to science news site PhysOrg.com, ThinThread evolved into the Trailblazer project which lacks the privacy protections of ThinThread.
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Encyclopedia
ThinThread is the name of a project that the United States National Security Agency engaged in during the 1990s, according to a May 17, 2006 article in the Baltimore Sun. The program involved wiretapping and sophisticated analysis of the resulting data, but according to the article, the program was discontinued after the September 11, 2001 attacks due to the changes in priorities and the consolidation of U.S. intelligence authority.
According to science news site PhysOrg.com, ThinThread evolved into the Trailblazer project which lacks the privacy protections of ThinThread. A consortium led by Science Applications International Corporation was awarded a $280 million contract to develop Trailblazer in 2002.
Technical details
The program would have used a technique of encrypting sensitive privacy information in order to circumvent legal concerns, and would have automatically identified potential threats. The sources of the data for this program would have included "massive phone and e-mail data," but the extent of this information is not clear. Only once a threat was discovered, would the data be decrypted for analysis by agents.
Baltimore Sun Article
[Edited]
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0518-07.htm
Published on Thursday, May 18, 2006 by the Baltimore Sun
project was shelved in part because of bureaucratic infighting
The program the NSA rejected, called ThinThread, was developed to handle greater volumes of information, partly in expectation of threats surrounding the millennium celebrations. Sources say it bundled together four cutting-edge surveillance tools. ThinThread would have:
- Used more sophisticated methods of sorting through massive phone and e-mail data to identify suspect communications.
- Identified U.S. phone numbers and other communications data and encrypted them to ensure caller privacy.
- Employed an automated auditing system to monitor how analysts handled the information, in order to prevent misuse and improve efficiency.
- Analyzed the data to identify relationships between callers and chronicle their contacts. Only when evidence of a potential threat had been developed would analysts be able to request decryption of the records.
In what intelligence experts describe as rigorous testing of ThinThread in 1998, the project succeeded at each task with high marks. For example, its ability to sort through massive amounts of data to find threat-related communications far surpassed the existing system. It also was able to rapidly separate and encrypt U.S.-related communications to ensure privacy.
The Pentagon report concluded that ThinThread's ability to sort through data in 2001 was far superior to that of another NSA system in place in 2004, and that the program should be launched and enhanced.
ThinThread was designed to address two key challenges: The NSA had more information than it could digest, and, increasingly, its targets were in contact with people in the United States whose calls the agency was prohibited from monitoring.
Trailblazer had more political support internally because it was initiated by Hayden when he first arrived at the NSA.
NSA's existing system for data-sorting has produced a database clogged with corrupted and useless information.
The mass collection of relatively unsorted data, combined with system flaws erroneously flag people as suspect, has produced numerous false leads, draining analyst resources. NSA leads have resulted in numerous dead ends.
"They basically just disabled the [privacy] safeguards"
NSA dropped the component that monitored for abuse of records. It not only tracked the use of the database, but hunted for the most effective analysis techniques, and some analysts thought it would be used to judge their performance.
Within the NSA, the primary advocate for the ThinThread program was Richard Taylor. ( Able Danger also ID some of the 9/11 cohort, that was also shutdown. ) Taylor who has retired from the NSA.
The strength of ThinThread's approach is that by encrypting information on Americans, it is legal regardless of whether the country is at war.
ThinThread "was designed very carefully from a legal point of view, so that even in non-wartime, you could have done it legitimately."
End of the project
The project was ended after successful testing by General Michael Hayden, and while the privacy elements were not retained, the analysis technology is reported to be the underlying basis of current NSA analysis techniques.
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