Could I ask who's calling?
ponstel The NSA would of course monitor Assad???s office around the clock if it could, the former official said. Other communications ??? from various army units in combat throughout Syria ??? would be far less important, and not analysed in real time. ???There are literally thousands of tactical radio frequencies used by field units in Syria for mundane routine communications,??? he said, ???and it would take a huge number of NSA cryptological technicians to listen in ??? and the useful return would be zilch.??? But the ???chatter??? is routinely stored on computers. Once the scale of events on 21 August was understood, the NSA mounted a comprehensive effort to search for any links to the attack, sorting through the full archive of stored communications. A keyword or two would be selected and a filter would be employed to find relevant conversations. ???What happened here is that the NSA intelligence weenies started with an event ??? the use of sarin ??? and reached to find chatter that might relate,??? the former official said. ???This does not lead to a high confidence assessment, unless you start with high confidence that Bashar Assad ordered it, and began looking for anything that supports that belief.??? The cherry-picking was similar to the process used to justify the Iraq war.