The ability to store information retrieved without warrant is the larger worry here. One reading of the DoD reg is that information is not “collected” until it is reviewed by an intelligence officer. Such implies that ‘we don’t have it until we see it,’ which is factually incorrect–if it is transformed into data suitable for storage and retrieval and manipulated through data-mining or text-mining operations.

It’s the transforming and storage of the information which is crucial with regard to privacy, not whether or not the DoD says it’s not seen it, as their reg suggests. Moreover, who decided on the language of that reg? I doubt it went through the usual public policy review process and comment period. Did anyone notice this portion of the regs, apart from DoD legal staff? Are we to trust their judgment with regard to civil rights (given the tendencies of the Reagan administration in those matters).

I wonder how long the various intelligence agencies are saving this information. With a sophisticated enough database of multiple data sets, and the ability to cross-link among those data sets, would it be possible for a phone call made to a German number fifteen years ago, which may have passed to a half-dozen users in the meantime, suddenly get pulled up in a contemporary data mining effort because it was currently listed to a suspected terrorist cell member?

The issue of what is stored is germane, since we know from CIFA that regulations regarding required data purges are being ignored.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051220-5808.html

1% of calls monitored and switched means all calls.

“As Zimmermann describes above, you monitor a few seconds of some fraction of the calls looking for “hits,” and then you move on to another fraction. If a particular call generates a hit, then you zero in on it for further real-time analysis and possible human interception. All the calls can be recorded, cached, and further examined later for items that may have been overlooked in the real-time analysis.”