Word: phoning
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...Americans still have very few details about the phone-mining operation, which the President maintains does not include routine eavesdropping on phone calls. And given the recent slide in the public's confidence in Bush, asking the public to trust him to balance the values of privacy and security could turn out to be a dicier proposition than it was in December, when the New York Times revealed that the President had authorized the supersecret NSA to conduct no-warrant wiretaps of hundreds and perhaps thousands of phone calls and e-mail messages between people inside the U.S. and parties...
...been a winning one for Bush, but the political landscape around him has shifted considerably. That is especially true among his conservative base, where trust in the President has dropped sharply. A Republican strategist close to the Bush team says of the secret collection of the nation's phone records, "On the surface of this, it appears government is extending a little farther than was discussed last fall. This is the kind of thing that a lot of core conservatives aren't crazy about. They see it as government overstepping its bounds, without it being clear what the end product...
Officials insist that the NSA is not eavesdropping on the millions of law-abiding Americans whose phone records it has collected but merely compiling what the telephone companies refer to as "call detail" information, recording what number called what number, when and for how long. "It's just digits," insists a White House official. "Just a bunch of data, a bunch of numbers." But while the information that is being turned over to the government does not include the identities of those who own the phone numbers on either end of a call, that is often easy enough to figure...
...idea is to sift through all that data, using a process called link analysis, searching for patterns--a burst of calls from pay phones in Detroit to cell phones in Pakistan, for instance. The NSA can whittle down the hundreds of millions of phone numbers harvested to hundreds of thousands that fit certain profiles it finds interesting; those in turn are cross-checked with other intelligence databases to find, perhaps, a few thousand that warrant more investigation. "That data can be extremely useful, even if you never know who is on the other end of the phones," says Bryan Cunningham...
...certifies that it has grounds, it may also collect more information, such as the customer's name, address and billing information. Last year the FBI issued 9,254 such orders, known as National Security Letters, to obtain information about 3,501 people from banks and phone, Internet and credit-card companies...