telephone subscribers or identifying material. what you are doing is you are listening to what at the nsa they call selectors. that could be a terrorist cell phone in yemen being carried by a known member of al qaeda of the arabian peninsula. so you re up on that selector and one of the things you want to know is okay, here is my suspect. it s an al qaeda operator, somebody they looked at for a long time. you ve got him on his phone communicating with people but now you have to ask, well, is he communicating with anybody in the united states, because they re talking about an attack in the u.s. so now you run that against big data, that s all of the calls, you know, from that phone or from another phone to that number, from sprint, verizon, at & t, and then you find hey, i have five hits here. you ve got a key al qaeda planner who is talking about attacks in the united states and you take your five hits and now you throw that over the fence to