I'm sure this is going to become a big deal:

NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans - most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

Most people won't read past the headline. Some will skim the article and walk away thinking, "Bush is wiretapping even more phone calls now." Folks who read the whole article, particularly the part I've quoted above, will walk away confused. They're "reaching into our homes and businesses" even though we're "not suspected of a crime," [dum da dum dum.......DUM!!!!!] but they're not "listening to or recording our conversations?"

Those who click through and read a few more articles on the subject will learn a bit more (and read "concerned" quotes from just about all 100 of the U.S. Senators). The NSA is looking for patterns in the data. The articles didn't specify, but I suspect it's something on the order of large numbers of calls being made to a single phone number, building, or area in a middle eastern country. Or maybe even large numbers of calls made between two citizens who both have made frequent calls to known terrorist trouble spots. That kind of thing.

These are just guesses, of course - I have no way of knowing. But assuming for a second that I'm at least directionally correct, my comment to Jeff Porten's TIDBits article about the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference still applies: this is likely the case of technical capability vs. practical application of that technology.

If they're looking for patterns, they need lots and lots of data. In this case, they also need phone numbers (source and destination), which is customer-identifying information. But if they take those millions of records and aggregate them to form patterns, they're not using anyone's phone number. It's the aggregation of this data that's interesting, not the data itself. (Of course, if they find a pattern and determine that it's probable cause, one would hope they'd seek a warrant before wiretapping a phone).

The fact that with such data, they could accuse Mr. Smith is having an affair with Mr. Johnson's wife, based on the correlations of late night phone calls to Mrs. Johnson at home and Mr. Smith at work makes for great copy, but isn't really what's happened here.

Don't get me wrong: we absolutely must discuss the potential this creates for abuses of personal privacy. Specifically, we need to find technical solutions that allow the government to take advantage of modern data mining techniques to catch terrorists without exposing its citizens to potential privacy abuses. These issues should, and are, being debated as we speak.

But that's not the story. The story is instantly tied to the tried & true NSA Wiretapping Story, even as they explain that they're not the same thing at all. It doesn't matter - they both contain the words "NSA," "phone," "collection" and "secret." So that's good enough. Also, the press gets a double-bonus here, because they can also catalog this story with the recent General Who Ran the NSA Wiretapping Program Gets Picked to Run the CIA story, which is also tangentially related at best.

A lot of newspaper and ad time is about to be sold, but we are going to need to dig deep to extract the facts described above. Such is the cost of the "free press."

UPDATE: Yahoo/USAToday have a handy Q&A-style fact sheet on the issue that is stripped of all spin & hysteria. It even makes a point to distance itself from the NSA Wiretapping story.