NSA confused international code "20" with area code "202"?

[kentuck]

And they say it was just an accident - a human error. Do you believe that?

Whose calls did they intercept in 2008? They admit that there was a "large number" of calls intercepted by putting in area code 202 instead of "20". If that is the case, whose calls were intercepted? Does anyone know except the NSA? Were the calls of Congressmen intercepted? Did anyone ask?

Should we just accept these "human errors" at face value? Or should we know more? Do we need to know more?

Do you believe the NSA?

=================

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/16/nsa_violated_surveillance_rules_thousands_of

<snip>
The Washington Post has revealed the National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008. According to an NSA audit from May 2012 leaked by Edward Snowden, there were 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications. In one case, the NSA intercepted a "large number" of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt. The audit only counted violations committed at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters and other facilities in the Washington area. We speak to Alex Abdo of the American Civil Liberties Union.

<snip>
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The Washington Post has revealed the National Security Agency has broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008. According to an NSA audit from May 2012 leaked by Edward Snowden, there were 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications. The audit only counted violations committed at the NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters and other facilities in the Washington area.

Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States. In one case, the NSA intercepted a, quote, "large number" of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt.

The report comes out less than a week after President Obama told reporters abuses have not been committed at the NSA.

....more

edited "international code 20"

[randome]

1. What do you want? A personally delivered handwritten summary?

Why would they admit to this if it wasn't true? Keying errors happen all the time. It's the nature of the Information Age. One digit can make all the difference.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]The truth doesn’t always set you free.
Sometimes it builds a bigger cage around the one you’re already in.[/center][/font][hr]

[niyad]

3. keep trying to justify the nsa. frankly, I need the laughs.

[On the Road]

78. Your Rule is Zero Tolernce for Typographical Errors?

Even with 200 million searches a year?

[niyad]

79. my rule is zero tolerance for the f****** surveillance state, with which some here seem to have

no problem at all. but keep trying, as I said, I need the laughs.

[wtmusic]

4. Did they destroy the intercepted data?

Of course not, because it wasn't a "keying error" at all. But nice try.

[JimDandy]

18. Exactly. That's why this is so unbelievable to those

who know anything about designing queries.

[kentuck]

19. Pretty basic, I would think?

Even when I use search engine on home computer and misspell or misprint, the program will ask, "Did you mean.."......"?

[JimDandy]

24. The NSA is extremely incompetent

if they weren't able to design what is a basic error capture routine taught in Database 101 classes.

[sabrina 1]

59. Or, this is how it was meant to work, so when caught, the could claim it was an error and

they know there will always be those who so want to support them and will buy any excuse they come up with.

[tom_kelly]

32. Wow, you're easy n/t

[Vinnie From Indy]

39. I would be satisfied with a believable excuse rather than this bit of horsehit!

When being an apologist, it is often times very beneficial to be discerning which battle to fight. For if you consistently defend in your face nonsense, you lose all credibility.

The reason the "keying error" mistake is so nakedly unbelievable is that with the gargantuan resources and brainpower devoted to the NSA it would seem impossible that they would not have dedicated entry fields. It would seem to be design 101 to have the entry field required for world area codes as a two character only box.

I am not buying the "keystroke error" excuse at all.

[dballance]

64. That lie of an excuse is so bad it's embarrassing.

The fact that the person performing the search didn't realize they were getting calls from Washington, DC rather than Egypt is ridiculous. Simply not believable. They could have noticed this right away and deleted the results of the errant search.

It took me all of 30 seconds to find the list of area codes and international dialing codes online and another 30 to find online services that will do a verification that you can embed in you computer program. It would be a very simple thing to put in a table of all the country and area codes to use that to validate the data as it's entered.

Lastly, they must be doing some really stupid searching if a country code can match an area code in a query. Even if someone is doing a free-form search they type in at the command line it's going to probably look something like:

"SELECT * FROM CALLS_METADATA_TABLE WHERE ORIGIN_COUNTRY_CODE = '202' OR DESTINATION_COUNTRY_CODE = '202'...." This would have yielded no results because they were selecting a non-existent country code. I cannot possibly imagine they designed their databases without the ability to split the phone number into its constituent parts for easy indexing and queries. If their database designers are that stupid designing a database where they know that selecting by country is important and they didn't design that into the database then none of us has much to worry about from the NSA. That would make them more stupid than just about every student in an intro course to database design.

It is beyond all reason to think that the NSA, with all their sophisticated computers and algorithms, highly-paid developers, mathematicians and analysts could simply select calls from the DC area code thinking they were selecting a country code. The two are not interchangeable and there isn't even a 202 country code. I can think of no reasonable way they'd get the results described in any reasonably-designed, modern database unless some total idiot was selecting phone numbers with a LIKE '20' sort of statement and that would have gotten them a lot more than just DC.

[RC]

69. Area Code or Country Code?

There is no country code 202.
http://countrycode.org/
http://www.countrycallingcodes.com/

Both the United States and Canada share the country code "1"

Example for US and Canada: 1-234-567-8901

They would have to key in a "1", for the country code, then the next three numbers, in this disputed case 202, which would give them Washington DC.
If they had keyed in just a "20" after the "1", they would have gotten back nothing.

If they would have keyed in a "20" for the first number, instead of a "1", then a "202", they could not have gotten back any information from this country.

To call Egypt, they would have to enter "011" - "20" - "2", then the local number. No matter how the input fields were set up, this could not have been an accident.

The whole lie is NSA bullshit. Just how stupid do they think we are?

[niyad]

2. don't believe we HAVE an area code "20"-- thought all the area codes were three digits?

so the nsa doesn't even know how area codes work? gee, that inspires confidence, doesn't it?

[Spider Jerusalem]

7. International country calling codes are two digits

the international calling code for Egypt is 20, for France it's 33, for the UK it's 44, etc.

[niyad]

8. thanks--was not thinking internationally this morning (not enough caffeine yet)

egypt, huh? what a surprise.

[kentuck]

9. What was going on in Egypt in 2008??

What was going on in Washington DC in 2008?

[BumRushDaShow]

16. "What was going on in Egypt in 2008??" How about this -

[font size="4"]Who's Behind Egypt's Revolt?[/font]

Bob Dreyfuss on January 31, 2011 - 2:42 PM ET

Who’s behind the Egyptian revolution?

<snip>

Let’s look at the emerging coalition, in its parts.

First, by all accounts, is the April 6 Youth Movement. Leftists, socialists and pro-labor people know that the movement takes its name from April 6, 2008, when a series of strikes and labor actions by textile workers in Mahalla led to a growing general strike by workers and residents and then, on April 6, faced a brutal crackdown by security forces. A second, allied movement of young Egyptians developed in response to the killing by police of Khaled Said, a university graduate, in Alexandria. Both the April 6 group and another group, called We Are All Khaled Said, built networks through Facebook, and according to one account the April 6 group has more than 80,000 members on Facebook. The two groups, which work together, are nearly entirely secular, pro-labor and support the overthrow of Mubarak and the creation of a democratic republic.

<snip>

Their self-description on Facebook reads:

We are a group of Egyptian Youth from different backgrounds, age and trends gathered for a whole year since the renewal of hope in 6 April 2008 in the probability of mass action in Egypt which allowed all kind of youth from different backgrounds, society classes all over Egypt to emerge from the crisis and reach for the democratic future that overcomes the case of occlusion of political and economic prospects that the society is suffering from these days. Most of us did not come from a political background, nor participated in political or public events before 6 April 2008 but we were able to control and determine our direction through a whole year of practice.

The April 6 movement wasn’t unknown to the United States and its embassy, we know from Wikileaks. In December, 2008, US Ambassador Margaret Scobey reported that the embassy was well aware the Egyptian dissidents, including April 6, had spoken of a plan to organize together to topple Mubarak, noting that “several opposition forces” had “agreed to support an unwritten plan for a transition to a parliamentary democracy, involving a weakened presidency and an empowered prime minister and parliament, before the scheduled 2011 presidential elections.” Scobey wrote that the details were “so sensitive it cannot be written down,” though she called it “highly unrealistic,” she helped arrange for some activists to attend a youth meeting in New York from December 3–5, 2008, called the “Alliance of Youth Movements Summit,” organized by the State Department. A representative of April 6, presumably Maher, visited Washington and met with thinktanks and officials on Capitol Hill.

That’s not to say that the opposition to Mubarak has American support—far from it, though various ultra-conservatives are trying to portray the Wikileaks information as evidence that the Obama administration has engaged in a conspiratorial, anti-Mubarak covert operation. Instead, the April 6 and its allies are a genuine, grassroots resistance movement that has carefully cultivated ties to various parts of the anti-Mubarak spectrum. In addition, its members helped organize Egypt-based protests against the Israeli invasion of Gaza. A 2008 article in the Christian Science Monitor described the arrest and torture of Maher in July 2008, and it described his “Facebook Youth” movement, which, the Monitor noted, is “tied to its continued detention of dozens of textile factory workers and townspeople from Mahalla, a large city in the Nile Delta.” The April 6 movement’s use of Facebook also drew an admiring profile in Wired magazine in 2008.

More: http://www.thenation.com/blog/158159/whos-behind-egypts-revolt#

[riderinthestorm]

14. Actually Washington DC. How conveeeeeeenient that DC's area code just happens to be

one digit off from Egypt....

Yeah, while they were spying on Egyptian communications, they just managed to "accidentally" spy on Americans in Washington DC as well...

Its pretty amazing to me that the politicians themselves aren't outraged by this. Its so blatantly obviously the NSA is engaged in almost Hooverian spying. In order to accumulate blackmail material?

[dballance]

54. Your first reply on this was still on target.

On Edit:

The fact that the person performing the search didn't realize they were getting calls from Washington, DC rather than country Egypt is ridiculous. Simply not believable. They could have noticed this right away and deleted the results of the errant search.

It took me all of 30 seconds to find the list of area codes and international dialing codes online and another 30 to find online services that will do a verification that you can embed in you computer program. It would be a very simple thing to put in a table of all the country and area codes to use that to validate the data as it's entered.

Lastly, they must be doing some really stupid searching if a country code can match an Area Code in a query. Even if someone is doing a free-form search they type in at the command line it's going to probably look something like:

"SELECT * FROM CALLS_METADATA_TABLE WHERE ORIGIN_COUNTRY_CODE = '202' OR DESTINATION_COUNTRY_CODE = '202'...." This would have yielded no results because they were selecting a non-existent country code. I cannot possibly imagine they designed their databases without the ability to split the phone number into its constituent parts for easy indexing and queries. If their database designers are that stupid designing a database where they know that selecting by country is important and they didn't design that into the database then none of us has much to worry about from the NSA. That would make them more stupid than just about every student in an intro course to database design.

[Igel]

46. Try flipping it and assume they're either geniuses or total fools.

You are given a number and need to enter it. For this, imagine two possibilities.

The first is that you just have what looks like an area code but is just "20". You think, "We don't have two-digit area codes. This is an area code. It must be missing a digit. What's the missing digit?" You decide to put in a "2" because the other options seem less likely. DC versus Jersey or Stockton. This seems sketchy, though.

More likely is the following. Perhaps you're given a phone number that is 20-2 .... Without the 011 in front of it, a Cairo number would be 20-2-xxxxxxxx. If you don't count those xs it wouldn't be hard to misread this as 202.

In fact, if you wanted to specify just numbers from the US to Cairo, you'd put in 202. Except you'd prefix it with the code for international calls.

Suddenly it seems less like malice and more like a bit of stupidity or carelessness.


Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

[niyad]

72. one can be both malicious and stupid or careless.

[Safetykitten]

5. NSA office procedures

[PSPS]

10. LOL. This is exactly the comparison. Nixon's swooners "believed" it too.

[niyad]

15. ahh, thanks for the memories.

[ljm2002]

21. Nailed it!

Ah, those were the days. Americans were still shocked by some of this stuff.

We've gone way beyond that now.

[unblock]

37. for you young'uns who don't understand this picture from the early '70s:

the thing at the left under the lamp is called a "typewriter" and was microsoft word, pdf creator, and a printer all in one. they can be found today in museums.

the big open double-box in the lower right is the original prototype for microsoft outlook, which at the time featured only an inbox and an outbox. spam folders didn't arrive until more than a decade later.

[riderinthestorm]

6. When I first read this, I thought "they really do think we're fools"

Honestly, this is so blatently ridiculous...

[n2doc]

12. It was complete, embarrassing-level BS n/t

[bvar22]

13. Oopsie!!! Oh Well.

now back to our regular programing (Repeat after me):

[font size=5]Now that SNOWDEN......
What a TRAITOR and COWARD!!!

[/font]

[JimDandy]

17. Intercepting calls in DC in an election year?

No way that was a mistake. And this report covered ONLY "mistakes" made at Ft Meade. How many more "mistaken" interceptions were made at all the other NSA facilities or by contractors? Hundreds of thousands? Millions?

How many more were intercepted, passed to other agencies and the acquisition trails then erased and fake evidence trails created to hide where the illegally obtained data originally came from? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands?

Time to make the secure communications transmission process (authentication, encryption, ISP bouncing) and detecting intrusions (MITM interceptions, keyloggers) easier and automated, so we can get a high percentage of every day users sending transmissions as securely as possible, in order to make it much harder for the NSA to abuse our right to be secure in our personal effects, as they continue to vacuum up all American's communications.

And at the same time we must work on significantly reducing funding of these monsterous agencies and enacting laws so that they are forced to gather and store only foreign communications that are specific and relevant to a current investigation.

ETA: They actually need to be dismantled, because, if they couldn't design what is an extremely simple error routine taught in Database 101 classes to eliminate unwanted query results, then they are simply incompetent.

[ljm2002]

20. Yes, they just accidentally stumbled on...

...area code 202, the area code for Washington DC.

Yep.

My response? "How conveeenient!"

[kentuck]

22. Another question:

Why did they wait until now to admit to this "mistake"? Did they perhaps think that someone had that information and might make it public so they decided to release it first? They could have told Congress about it before now, don't you think?

[questionseverything]

40. they did not admit it

snowden leaked their INTERNAL audit

(i want to point out an INTERNAL audit is worthless)

[Egnever]

62. How in the world do you think internal audits are worthless?

They are done all the time by organizations to improve efficiency or ferret out abuse of the systems in place. The idea there is no value to internal audits is so silly it makes me think I should discount everything you post as you seem to be lacking any sort of grasp of reality.

[questionseverything]

65. discount away

an INTERNAL AUDIT only reveals what the agency wants revealed or at least tries to present what is found in best light

only external,independent audits are of true value

[questionseverything]

75. ...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023498132

[Fuddnik]

23. It's an easy mistake to make..

Back in the '60s an '70's, the phone company used to issue credit card codes to some customers, and a bunch of us confused, drug-addled hippies mistakenly charged all of our long distance calls to the CIA.

[JimDandy]

34. Good laugh.

Not so funny when an intelligence agency makes a "mistake" that an extremely simple to design error capture routine would have eliminated during a query.

More like gross incompetence on their part.

[uponit7771]

25. What WOULD you believe from the NSA?! regards

[kentuck]

26. Nothing.

I would consider them 100% dishonest and deceitful and harmful to our nation.

[uponit7771]

29. ...exactly, the pleasing people such as would be fruitless, they might as well operate as usual

[kentuck]

33. I don't support their existence.

But if they must exist, I support 100% oversight at all times. They are a threat to us all, in my opinion. I don't trust them and I think anyone that does is too naive to know better. Just my opinion.

[uponit7771]

36. So you would trust the oversight by WHOM?! WHOM?! would you think wouldn't be influenced by

...these agencies?!

regards

[kentuck]

38. Who is running this country?

Our elected leaders or the NSA and our defense establishment?

If we cannot trust oversight to anybody that we elect, then we may as well turn off the lights...

[uponit7771]

41. The republicans via abuse of filibuster and unmitgated gerrymandering

[kentuck]

42. Well....

Let's just get down to the bare facts.

[uponit7771]

44. Yeap, and it'll stay that way...Paulians have the left scared of aliens while the right tears down..

...the 14th without much resistance

[kentuck]

45. How so?

???

[uponit7771]

47. If the stomping of the 14th amendment got the same amount of attention as the SUPPOSED stomping

... of the 4th amendment we might be able to vote the GOP out in 14...

No, the left is chasing aliens cause someone said be sKeered of the gov and their computers

[JimDandy]

56. Yes...you'd think the Obama administration could

handle protecting us from abuses of 2 amendments at the same time.

[Fuddnik]

71. The 14th Amendment must be the new talking point.

Every time someone talks about violations of the 4th Amendment, the team brings up the 14th amendment.

They're mutually exclusive. I value my privacy more than your diversions. What's next? Threaten us with the 2nd Amendment?

[unblock]

27. and then the city code for cairo is "2", so 20-2 is the code for egypt/cairo

so it's a plausible explanation.

whether it's what happened or it's a plausible cover story, we lack sufficient evidence and oversight to distinguish, and therein lies the real problem. if they *wanted* to target opposition party washington d.c. people, they could use this as a cover story and no one could really prove it wasn't an accident.

[riderinthestorm]

49. Nope. The dialing sequence starts with the international code "011" then the 20-2

for Cairo Egypt.

If the NSA doesn't even have query protections in place that aren''t discriminating bet national or international calls, especially when it comes to spying?!, then I have a bridge to sell you...

Its absolutely not plausible.

[unblock]

53. they're searching a database, not dialing a number.

they don't need to dial 011 first to search a database.

you won't store the 011 in the database at all, in fact; what's the use in that?

[JimDandy]

50. No. That just makes the NSA extremely incompetent.

They are not, but it appears they would rather be thought incompetent than proven to be doing illegal spying on politicians and the upper echelon in DC.

A student taking a Database 101 class could have written a simple error capture routine to eliminate this "mistake" from happening during a query. This is why that scenario is highly implausible.

[unblock]

58. but they're making a ton of ad hoc queries, which are quite error prone.

get a column name wrong, or forget one logic step, and this sort of mistake can happen quite easily. as a database programmer, i've been there many times.

they could have searched for a phone number starting with 202 intending to search their international database, but instead searched their domestic database. oops, one line specifying the wrong database. easy innocent error.



*that said*, as i mentioned, it's very easy to use this plausible innocent error to cover up a completely deliberate effort to spy on washington politicos, and against, therein lies the problem.

[kentuck]

61. Then they pass the info on to their military support...

...and a drone drops a bomb on Georgetown.

[NorthCarolina]

28. Oops...fat fingered the keyboard....my bad. nt

[bhikkhu]

30. Well, perhaps the tech had keystroke recording software installed on his terminal

...and a camera over his desk recording his activities. Then it could be proven whether it was an accident or not .

[kentuck]

35. My last employer had that technology.

They could watch your finger movements on the keyboard.

[bhikkhu]

43. That would be pretty weird. Some delivery drivers have it bad too

...with dash cameras that record their driving, and with GPS monitors on the truck keeping track of everything. We had one driver we were talking to who told us he couldn't stay and chat because dispatch would question him about any stop that took more than 90 seconds, even if his averages were all good. That would suck!

[kentuck]

57. Those programs have been available for the last 10 or so years.

It can watch you move your cursor on whatever program you are on at the moment.

[Rex]

31. I believe them as much as I believe Clapper gave an honest answer to Congress.

nt.

[MotherPetrie]

51. So if they're not lying, they're unbelievably incompetent and careless. Obama's dishonest defense of

This outfit and its massive malfeasance-- compared with, say, his immediate no-questions-asked firing of the innocent Shirley Sherrod -- throws the president's true character into sharp, ugly, and very troubling relief.

[kentuck]

60. Also...

Isn't it a little weird that 5 years later, they decide they should inform the Congress and the public of this little "mistake"? Why did they remember something so trivial that happened 5 years ago??

[notadmblnd]

63. 202 Washington DC?

Hard for me to believe that it was a mistake.

I can believe though that it was used for spying on politicians so they could be extorted and blackmailed.

[another_liberal]

66. Hell no, I don't believe the NSA!

Who is a big enough fool to believe an organization whose leaders have already been caught lying to Congress repeatedly? If they would take the risk of doing that, why the hell would they feel compelled to tell us the truth? They say whatever they need us to believe, that is all you can be sure of in the case of the NSA.

[kentuck]

67. That is why I do not believe that Obama knew...

They did not tell him either. They are independent of any scrutiny. They have been for many years.

[another_liberal]

70. Absolutely!

If they would risk perjury charges for lying to Congress, and they did, why wouldn't they also risk lying to their President? Their hubris is full-blown.

[aquart]

68. Believe the NSA? No.

Believe they bungle incessantly? Oh, yeah.

I do not consider these beliefs to be contradictory.

[Ohio Joe]

73. That would be a very strange accident...

I've been in IT a loooong time and I can tell you that every time I've seen phone number saved, area code is it's own field, as would be international code... So for this to be true, they would have to have not only put in the wrong number but put it in the wrong place... And then never have even glanced at the results as it would have been wickedly obvious that it was not what they wanted. A complete bullshit excuse for this... Simply a lie.

[jmowreader]

74. Assume each improperly intercepted line of metadata is an incident

If the analyst had a brainfart and fed in "202" instead of ""20" you will have a couple thousand incidents on your hands by the time you notice you fucked up. People who live in major American cities use the hell out of their phones..

I keep repeating this but...google USSID 18 and read it. There are very specific procedures you follow when you fuck up this bad.

[On the Road]

76. They are Citing *That* as an Example of Abuse?

That is what most of this stuff is going to come down to. Stupid stuff like this.

[KamaAina]

77. Supposedly the city code for Cairo is 2

so calls to Cairo contain a string 20-2.

Not buying it. All international calls are preceded by the international dialing code 011.

[On the Road]

80. Thank You for The City Code Information

It explains a lot and did not occur to me. But as to your conclusion: