Why NSA's PRISM Program Makes Sense

The National Security Agency's headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland is the nexus for signals-intelligence activity in the intelligence community. The agency's PRISM program is designed to intercept terrorist and other hostile traffic on the Internet that originates outside the United States but passes through domestic communications infrastructure en route to its destination. (Photo credit: octal)

President Obama’s firm defense of the National Security Agency’s “domestic” eavesdropping program on Friday should calm some of the more extravagant fears provoked by public disclosure of its existence.  I put the word “domestic” in quotes because the effort to monitor Internet and other communications traffic isn’t really about listening in on Americans, or even foreign nationals living here, but rather intercepting suspicious transmissions originating overseas that just happen to be passing through the United States.
That is an eminently sensible way of keeping up with terrorists, because it is so much easier than tapping into network conduits in other countries or under the seas (not that we don’t do that).  In order to grasp the logic of the NSA program, which is code-named PRISM, you have to understand how the Internet evolved.  It was a purely American innovation at its inception, with most of the infrastructure concentrated in a few places like Northern Virginia.
I live a few miles from where the Internet’s first big East Coast access point was located in the parking garage of an office building near the intersection of Virginia’s Routes 7 and 193, an area that some people refer to as Internet Alley.  Because the Worldwide Web grew so haphazardly in its early days, it was common until recently for Internet traffic between two European countries to pass through my neighborhood.  There were only a few major nodes in the system, and packet-switching sends messages through whatever pathway is available.

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The Washington Post story on PRISM today has a graphic illustrating my point about how bandwidth tends to be allocated globally.  Like a modern version of ancient Rome’s Appian Way, all digital roads lead to America.  It isn’t hard to see why Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper could say on Thursday that “information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect.”  No kidding: PRISM generated an average of four items per day for the President’s daily intelligence briefing in 2012.
The key point to recognize, though, is that this really is foreign intelligence.  The architecture of the Internet enables NSA to collect it within U.S. borders, but there is no intention to spy on U.S. citizens.  A few elementary algorithms used in narrowing the analysis of traffic should be sufficient to assure that the privacy of American citizens is seldom compromised.  President Obama stressed in his comments today that safeguards have been put in place to prevent the scope of NSA eavesdropping from expanding beyond its original purpose.
I don’t want to minimize the dangers to civil liberties associated with such a program.  It needs to be monitored closely, which is one reason why Congress has been kept informed about its existence. However, compared with the danger posed by terrorists bent upon destroying America, PRISM presents at worst only modest danger to our liberties.  Its main purpose is to protect those liberties, not subvert them.