NSA PRISM Data Collection Program - A Business Analyst View

As a Business Analyst in software implementations, I had the privilege of working at a freight shipping company -- you can insert name of one of the top 3 operators and you'd be right because they all follow the same government regulations pertaining to moving of goods into and out of the country. As far as the government is concerned the freight operators can use whatever software system to process shipments but they must report shipment details to government agencies. In this example, the US Customs under the umbrella of the department of Homeland Security and Border Control.

Shipping operators report all the information regarding the shipments to the US Custom and for certain shipments that meet certain criteria the freight operators do even more.

The NSA collection of phone records and other electronic communication between parties -- code named PRISM data-collection program -- under the  Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) probably has similar data requirements.

Using my freight operator example, the US customs require operators to  provide information in a scenario as such:

• ·        Send, electronically (protocol might be EDI, XML), data containing the shipment origin information and the destination and we (government agency) will determine if we need more information or further examination of the shipment and its content.
• ·         The freight shipper sends, from its servers, all the required data to government agency's computer servers:

o   Shipment originator full name, address (city, state/province, postal code), country and content of shipment.

o   Receiver or consignee full name, address (city, state/province, postal code), country of destination and content of shipment

§  If the agency's computer, in scanning the millions of records, spots shipment that meets certain criteria, say the shipment is going to or coming from a country of concern, for example, Yemen, Iran, North Korea, or Syria, it will trigger need for closer look.

§  An electronic message will be sent back to the freight shipper's computer server (usually in real time) with instructions:

·         Provide even more information on the shipment in question

·         Set the shipment aside (now we are talking of physical goods like express envelope, a small or big package  or whatever the shipper will allow you to ship) fur further examination.

§  Freight operator holds the shipment until it is released for shipment or confiscated by the government agency.

The same analogy could be applied to the NSA's PRISM program. The complexity resides in the sheer number of records that NSA computer will have to shift through. This is the reason data mining and business intelligence (BI) has been a much desired skills in IT in recent years. But just as the US Customs computer can detect a shipment of concern, the NSA servers, I would suspect works the same way.  Moreover since this warrantless surveillance was enacted by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), phone and internet companies, protest as they may, have no other choice but to comply. Again, because of the size of the data, the companies might not want to expend their resources in assisting NSA's program, instead they provide the entire data in bulk and let NSA shift through them.

As a Business Analyst I am required to envision what features a system might have or how it may behave functionally. Since I have no idea how this works I can only speculate, rather simplistically.

• ·        The assumption, as stated in the Internet news outlets, is that the records requested within a few days after Boston Marathon bombing incident. The scenario might go as follows:

o   Give me records of phone calls originating from cities or zip codes in Boston metro between April 10th to April 20th (The bombing occurred on April 15th).

o   Filter those records for calls with destination to Chechnya, Yemen, Syria, or Iran

o   Filter the records to certain localities of known terrorists activities in those countries

o   Match those phone numbers to known numbers of suspected terrorists individuals or groups

o   What is the location of those phones that received calls from Boston, MA area (note that phones have GPS and other technogies that can pinpoint exact location of where a call is made and received)

o   Does the profile collected, by the data mining activities, match any individuals or organizations we suspected of terrorism  plans in the last decade?

• ·         NSA, CIA or any other agency involved would  analyze the collected information until they can make a sense of it.
• ·         Then they make decisions which could involve more spying -- listening to phone conversations between caller and receiver.

As stated in Boston.com and Wired magazine, the new NSA's datacenter in "Utah facility will be able to handle so much information that its storage capacity is measured in what are known as yottabytes. It’s enough information to fill 200 trillion DVDs." This takes "Big Data" to a whole different level of crunching that will require supercomputers by IBM or Cray.