[ISN] At NSA, computers sometimes make the policy calls

http://www.nextgov.com/big-data/2012/08/nsa-computers-sometimes-make-policy-calls/57519/

By Aliya Sternstein
Nextgov
Aug 20, 2012

John DeLong, the first-ever compliance director at the Pentagon’s spy 
agency, spends his days making sure analysts are not snooping on 
Americans.

U.S. law forbids the National Security Agency from intercepting 
communications between citizens. While privacy advocates argue that NSA 
databases nevertheless accumulate records on Americans, in fact, some of 
those systems are calling the shots to delete that information.

“There are times when we use technology to literally make legal and 
policy decisions,” said DeLong, 37, a lawyer whose additional math and 
physics degrees likely prepared him for the multifaceted task of 
policing code-breakers.

With an ever-increasing amount of messages to crack and data patterns to 
follow, agents have limited time to observe what he describes as “very 
specific procedures that govern their use and handling of that data.” 
So, machines sometimes patrol privacy.

“There are obviously some decisions that you can’t automate. You have to 
rely on a human for judgment. And we have lots of training” on foreign 
espionage authorizations, DeLong told Nextgov in an interview. “We have 
to make sure those authorizations pass from human to human from machine 
to machine very carefully.”

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