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Data-Sifting For Timely Intelligence Still an Elusive Goal
gyrogeerloose writes "Although there was evidence to suggest that the Japanese navy was up to something in December 1941, that information was scant and came too late. Today's intelligence agencies have another problem altogether — more information than they can deal with, and computers aren't helping as much as one might expect for reasons that will be familiar to Slashdot readers: computers can crunch numbers faster and more accurately than humans, but they're still easily baffled by language as it is commonly used in the real world. Metaphor, slang and simple figures of speech can confuse the best algorithm and, as quoted in the linked article in the San Diego Union-Tribune, 'A system that takes a week to discover a bombing that will occur in a day isn't very useful.'"
If someone says, "I'm gonna bust a cap in the president's head", they could be referring to destroy some sort of hat or other head covering. The computer will back me up on this.
Which is why human intelligence is much more useful than signal intelligence (data mining). You can't get a sense of a person's thoughts by reading something nearly as well as you can by talking to them. IMHO, fighting any war remotely will last much longer than one fought with boots on the ground.
Squadron Leader: "Top hole. Bally Jerry pranged his kite right in the how's your father. Hairy blighter dicky-birded, feathered back on his Sammy, took a waspy, flipped over on his Betty Harper's and caught his can in the Bertie."
Computer: WTF?
Pilot: "Bunch of monkeys on your ceiling, sir! Grab your egg and fours and let's get the bacon delivered."
Computer: (explodes)
Oh I don't know... "We win or we nuke you." "You win!" See? It's a question of degrees.
Incidentally, this is why we don't want Iran to become a nuclear power.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
This is why we need to legally mandate that all human communication occur in newspeak. Ambiguity is the enemy of security.
We use an expert system to try and figure out what air traffic controllers are doing in a simulation. It is a big system and making it fast means trading alot of memory for speed. Identifying rules to categorize what a subject is doing is hard, especially because you see things that arent' expected when you think about what rules the system can use to identify a category of interaction. Looking at a stream of recording of system events is similar to looking at a stream of intelligence hits like 'subject crossed border x', 'subject a called subject b', 'subject purchased x, y, and z with credit card #k at mid #l with location coordinants (m,n)' The hardest part is that the system wants context but computers don't do context very well. To do it fast, you have to come up with vectors representing context state and rules and accept a certain amount of errors. Data can easily run into the hundreds of gigabytes for only 1 hour of monitoring a self contained experiment. It is fun though...
"A system that takes a week to discover a bombing will occur in a day isn't very useful.'"
I would argue that it can be. If your system takes a week to discover a bomb plot that occurred last week, refinements can be made to the system to improve its detection abilities.
There's one thing that's worse than too little data: Too much data that may or may not be relevant to your task.
It's bad to have no data. But that can be remedied. Having more data than you can process, worse, data where you cannot discriminate between wheat and chaff is pretty much useless. And that's basically what we have now. They were busy collecting data left and right, not asking whether that data could be relevant. Now they're stuck with a buttload of data that may or may not be relevant.
The best solution? Toss it and start over. And this time, collect only what's relevant.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Is not that technology can't sift through some language as easy as it wants to. The problem is that (I am speaking for US and some allies) we have moved away from HUMAN intel. All the technology in the world can be rendered useless when for example, terrorists cells start to use face to face only communication in a tree like scheme. Only a few people ever talk to the people that pull the strings, and they talk to only a few people, only by passing letters or by talking face to face. I took a counter-surveillance course where I was amazed at the relative ease it took to shake even trained professionals. (It was also very fun to learn how to make drops and such) The point being that if someone really doesn't want to get caught, especially in a foreign country, its not too difficult. Humans are vulnerable, weak, and irrational beings capable of cognitive dissonance at every corner. If you want real intel, start focusing on HUMINT again. I read a very good book written by the guy whom the movie "Syriana" was based. Basically it boiled down to the CIA moving away from tried and true practices of gathering intel through human means, and becoming heavily reliant on both technology and politics to get stuff done, a major factor why he retired. Anyway, just my two cents.
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
Which is why human intelligence is much more useful than signal intelligence (data mining).
Exactly. If people can't sift through the mass of information (and misinformation) we have today, what hope does a computer have? Just look at how hard it is to find "The Truth" in todays news, or on the Internet...
Japan had only one real front in the lead up to Pearl Harbor. For all intents and purposes Japan was only focused on expanding westward into Asia. They envisioned "breathing space" like Germany did and meant to build an "Eastern co-prosperity sphere" led by an enlightened Japanese government. Naturally there was some resistance from the neighboring countries, but America and Japan didn't really have any reason to fight except that Japan was allied with Germany and there was a greater anti-imperialist zeitgeist among the Allies.
So when America decided to blockade South Asian shipping routes to effectively starve Japan of steel and other necessary resources, the Japanese had only one recourse. They bombed Pearl Harbor in an attempt to destroy as much of the American fleet as possible in the shortest amount of time. It was strategically the right move.
Now, if you want to say that the American military had its head up its ass that fateful morning, you'll find support from most historians. But to make the claim that no one expected an attack is simply absurd.
Which is why human intelligence is much more useful than signal intelligence
People lie.
The US government is especially good at sending bogus signals. There's no reason to believe other governments aren't as good.
All intelligence has it's problems. The trick is to put together enough different sources to weed out the bogus, and home in on the truth, all while keeping everything secret. Basically, it's an impossible task, but sometimes it's good enough, and sometimes you go to war looking for WMD that aren't there.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
There is a lot of work being done to integrate search algorithms into simple gameplay. It seems to me the best way would be to have a back-end algorithm that breaks up the work into "game-able" chunks, and another that queues up the chunks into the front-end game engine.
At least, it seems to me that if we know that binary computing sucks at solving the problem, and we know that human computing is great, that it's fundamentally wrong to be using binary computers to do the work.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
In the mid 1990s I watched a video tape of "The Falcon and the Snowman". It is based on a real story of a young man who worked at a sensitive location at TRW (his father was in the FBI and got him the job through the old boy network) which was responsible for sending and receiving CIA cables from overseas. Sometimes, they mixed up the TWXs and they saw cables they weren't supposed to. It was by this that he learned of how the CIA helped in the overthrow the government of Australia in the 1970s, the famous Whitlam constitutional crisis. You can read about it on Wikipedia. It can be debated how effective or ineffective the CIA's efforts were, but they've never denied their involvement, and in fact it was alleged that John Kerr was a CIA asset. Anyhow, so one day in 1997 or 1998 I was sitting at my SunOS x86 workstation at work, back before NAT had become popular, and I decided to surf the web and visit some lefty Australian web sites that discussed the extent of CIA involvement in overthrowing Australia's government in the 1970s. Several days later, I noticed SNMP requests coming into my workstation, scanning for any information about it. If I hadn't set my workstation to log absolutely everything, if it wasn't a UNIX workstation, if I didn't control the Cisco router and access list and so on and so forth I never would have seen it, it would have been a standard SNMP request. In fact, I didn't log for everything and who knows what other queries came to the machine. I saved the request for years but then lost it in a hard drive crash. It came out of a US army intelligence division (.MIL) that was based in Quantico, Virginia and which had some long acronym which I now forget. I thought the military wasn't supposed to monitor the communications of US citizens, but apparently not in this case. Also, as soon as I saw this, I thought of how I had read about Whitlam and the CIA on the Australian web site days before, and that was the only thing I had done on the machine that they might have been interested in. With the Patriot Act etc. who knows what will be happening.
Today's intelligence agencies have another problem altogether — more information than they can deal with . . .
This is the ultimate argument against those defending increased surveillance activities to fight terrorism (or any other crime). Intelligence agencies already have way more information than they can deal with just from public sources. 99.999% of it is the noise of people going about their normal lives. Getting out the interesting bits is a hard problem, and adding more is only going to slow you down. It can help if you've already nailed down a good list of suspects and therefore have a small, targeted list of people to watch. But if that's the case, what's the big deal about getting a warrant?
Not a typewriter
If someone had a process by which the attack of 9/11 could have been forecast using only information being processed on 9/10 and it produced a report highlighting the attack would happen by 9/18 I think the CIA would be beating a path to their door.
Nullius in verba
The meaning of a piece if a communication involves not just the text, but the specific context (who is the source, who is the recipient), the social context, and the cultural context.
For an example of the first - a 8 year old who says "I'm going to shoot her" (especially if the context is a game of cops and robbers) should be understood differently to an adult to says the same thing. And the meaning also varies depending on whether the adult is a photographer or not, and whether 'her' refers to a model or an ex-wife. None of these things may be made explicit anywhere in a any intercepted communication.
As another example, a description of a gory murder by a wild animal carries a very different meaning if the text starts with the words "Once upon a time".
You can't separate text, meaning and culture and consciousness. Which is why the problem of interpreting natural language is so hard; harder than even the article author seems to acknowledge.
'A system that takes a week to discover a bombing will occur in a day isn't very useful.'
Hmm, this could be a problem, unless.... *thinking pose*
I know! Time travel!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Human SIGINT is flawed because they can easily be manipulated, compartmentalized and shut down when neccessary. You can also be relying on people who are flawed morally, intellectually, etc...
An Example
15 of the 19 hijackers fail to fill in visa documents properly in Saudi Arabia. Only six are interviewed. All 15 should have been denied entry to the US. [Washington Post, 10/22/02, ABC, 10/23/02] Two top Republican senators say if State Department personnel had merely followed the law, 9/11 would not have happened.[ AP, 12/18/02More]
At least 13 of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers were never interviewed by U.S. consular officials before being granted visas to enter the United States, according to a congressional report issued yesterday. The finding contradicts previous assurances from the State Department that most of them had been thoroughly screened.
The General Accounting Office also found that, for 15 hijackers whose applications could be found, none had filled in the documents properly.
...
The GAO report found that all 15 of the hijackers from Saudi Arabia applied for visas in Jeddah or Riyadh; two others applied in their native United Arab Emirates. The remaining two, including ringleader Mohamed Atta, an Egyptian citizen, applied as "third-country" applicants in Berlin.
None of 18 separate visa applications by 15 of the hijackers was completed properly, the report said. Thirteen of the 15, who were from Saudi Arabia or UAE, were never interviewed before being approved for a visa, the report found. Investigators were unable to review the applications for four other hijackers, including Atta, because they were destroyed.
If you want to see the actual Visas of some 9/11 hijackers you can go here.
If you want to know why people with such obviously fraudulent Visa applications can get in to the country consider the testimony of J. Michael Springmann. He worked at the Jeddah consulate approving Visas and says he was occasionally overruled by the CIA. Remember that when Springmann was working there they weren't known as terrorists, they were still called freedom fighters.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
Oh shut up already. If a country X decides to threaten another country with nukes, EVERY other country that has nukes will be very displeased and tell country X to GTFO. The whole reason that nukes are great as a defense is that nobody wants to be involved in a nuclear war. Which is also why they suck for offense. The only reason we don't want some countries to have nukes is because it sucks when those things get lost/stolen/whatever. A country is unable to use nukes, but a person or an organisation is.
We're *not* afraid that Iran will declare a war on someone and threaten to use nukes, because that would be suicide for Iran. Having said that, one might suspect that if Iran were to be in possession of such weapons, those bombs might find their way into other peoples hands (on purpose or by accident).
From Irans perspective, I can imagine wanting some big bombs to discourage an American invasion (the USA seems to like invading countries in the Middle East, and a good reason for an invasion in optional...).
Or maybe Iran simply wants nuclear power and the rest of the world should just gtfo and mind their own business.
... if Bush would not have gone looking for porn, or Obama for offshore bank accounts, the remaining data could be analyzed in a timely manner for those bombs they all claim to be interested in.
Have gnu, will travel.
Sure it's late, but you really know you got the right answer.
So, not all bad, and it will be easy to check your work.
No brain, no pain.
Indeed. In addition, this is not a new problem.
If you visit STASI museum* in Berlin, one thing you'll no doubt learn is this: STASI was a lot more inefficient than they could have been because they had much more data than they could process. They didn't have problem with gathering information but with acting based on it. They received so many reports and pieces of information that there was no chance for them to tie them all together and analyze them all.
That's why I don't think that the biggest risks we face are increase in amount of CCTV cams and whatnot. They can't effectively be used to trace us because nobody can analyze all that data. Solving crimes (as inefficient as they are in that) is pretty much the only thing they can be used for. However, when I hear about new advances in areas of face recognization and stuff like that I always begin wonder what kind of central intelligence agency will the next dictatorship have access to.
*Yes, I know the difference between Gestapo and STASI but if you interpret godwin's law that literally, you are missing the point. In addition, I would be surprised if Gestapo didn't have a similar problem.
This article is more about technical difficulties in raw data interpretation, not the apparent mining of financial and intelligence records which was part of "Able Danger".
The way it is (should be?) done is as follows:
Data mine to generate reports to human beings.
Conventional strictly human intelligence is still done and needed. The pitfall is that an organization could try to cut costs too much by relying too much on computer generated reports. Aside from that pitfall, data mining is efficient to find instances where traditional human methods would have failed as long as you tune the system not to have a ridiculous amount of false positives.
For the time being, human review is still needed ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Nobody's actually proposing replacing one with the other, though.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
... I've been answering the phone with "Assassinate the vice-president" the last five years. I figure when I finally do commit some hideous act of terror upon the American people, they'll have been ignoring me as a potential threat because of obfuscation.
All your base are belong to us. You have no chance to survive make your time.
jeoli gayo ( !)
rewriting history since 2109
1. Having information expire before it is discovered follows practical usage of encryption.
2. Basically, an extra layer is being applied at the content level: slang and the like are just word substitution.
3. Too much information probably indicates that attention is being diverted to cover unnecessary discussions. Think of it this way: you're looking for someone in a city. You could wiretap a few people close to that person and hope you catch some bit of conversation OR you wiretap the whole city guaranteeing you have every bit of conversation. The first approach will offer information in real time while the second approach will take years to discover relevant information. The first approach is adopted for speed, while the only reason to adopt the second is for archiving.
This is not my sig
the article talks about "information" but forgets that "data" is not quite the same thing. "information" is what results once the processed data is given context, analysed, and understood. Data without that remains data, and essentially useless.
Both these make gigantic databases full of potentially privacy-damaging data worse than useless. You can't do much good with them, but you can't be sure they won't be misused. Still, various bigwigs whose job it is to understand this insist that oversized databases are a "must capability to have". There's your tax money at work.
And that doesn't even begin to touch on things like the yurp "data sharing" agreements, the TSA flight data hoovering, various biometric databases, telecoms databases in yurp and NSA hoovering in yoosah, and so on and so forth. It's all the same bad thing.
Computers and Common Sense, the Myth of Thinking Machines. 1961 by Mortimer Taube.
Still valid, but mostly unheard of.
Interesting that in the English Wikipedia there is even no article on him.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
If Iran wants nuclear power then Russia is willing to sell it to them. Nice light water reactors that can't be used to enhance uraninmum. However Iran isn't satisfied with that. They want their own complete infrastructure. The kind where they can build whatever they want including bombs.
My personalhope is that there is yet another revolution in Iran before then. Many will be dead, but things stand a chanceof being better.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
The US government is especially good at sending bogus signals. There's no reason to believe other governments aren't as good.
Not just governments. The same can apply to organised crime, corporations, etc, etc.
How many times to serious potential terrorists use channels that could be monitored by the governments? I'd figure - except for the low-hanging fruit that would probably expire themselves whilst hooking up their explosives, doing us all a favor in the process - that the _real_ bad guys would be almost out of reach as far as surveillance goes. I mean, don't they all have encrypted private networks, if not at least encrypted phones, and other methods of communication?
So, of this volume of data, how much of it really pertains to serious, credible threats? Of course, that's the answer the gov wants, but, seriously, are the most dangerous bad guys really that stupid to communicate their plans almost in the clear?
Truth, Justice. Or the American Way.
Hey, we could start one off, by supporting a few choice characters. I'm sure that'll go down just fine.
Pearl Harbor...
A lovely concept but what human operator generally has a full view of all the actors, events, relationships and their importance? No one operator is going to have all the pieces of the puzzle in their head which is why they have to write up Intelligence Information Reports to share information with other operators and analysts that try to put all the pieces together. Now you have a mountain of IIR's to either sift through by hand or you're right back to the data mining problem.
Key take away: Data Mining Issues and HUMINT aren't mutually exclusive
The problem is both hard and simple at the same time: Hire Google-like problem solvers. There are a lot of people really good at logic problems. However, companies (including the government) don't hire smart people because they are smart. They hire skillsets and such (when a smart person could be taught the skill set and get more done in 6 months than hiring a mediocre person that already has the skillset for the position). Don't look for programmers. Don't look for linguists. Find people that can solve complex problems. Motivate them. Give them resources like programmers and linguists, and the ability to study those subjects directly as well. And then the problem will be worked on. But having bureaucrats trying to fix the problem will have them not even consider the route that will get them the solution fastest.
It's a cryptography problem. There's information stored in codes. Sometimes the code is regular language, sometimes slang, sometimes coded language, but it's all decoding meaning from words. Problem solvers are better at solving the problem than having someone program a solution when no one actually figured out the solution, or having some linguists come up with direct matches that miss a large portion of what they want and get huge numbers of false positives.
But hiring someone that doesn't know what they are doing and training them is anti-American. We'll import our labor at a higher cost than actually train someone for the position. So I don't think anyone will ever do it. Google proved me wrong, but it doesn't seem anyone else is following their lead.
Learn to love Alaska
A system taking a week to discover a bombing that will occur in a day's time will (by Moore's law) break even in 33.9 month's time. I.e., in 33.9 month's time, it won't take week - it'll take a day. So keep developing - it'll be viable in three years.
They should post it all on Slashdot and let us decide!
The data overload problem will only get worse in the future, which is why the next frontier in national security (and many other fields) may not be faster, smarter computers, but tapping into powers of the human mind that most modern people don’t even know exist (and deny dogmatically). I’m speaking of “psi” powers, which the CIA and other intelligence agencies have used extensively with some pretty amazing results. Read “Outside the Gates of Science: Why It's Time for the Paranormal to Come in from the Cold” by Damien Broderick for a fascinating account of this research. Remote viewers, for example, have been able to draw detailed pictures of secret bases, Saddam Hussein’s hideout, etc., but the techniques are erratic and don’t seem very amenable to scientific analysis. In general I wonder if the “Butlerian Jihad” of the Dune novels isn’t so far-fetched, and mental training schools like the Mentat and the Benne-Gesserit are the way forward for a civilization drowning in its own data.
Everyone who uses the expression "is da' bomb" will be arrested and taken off the street.
SIGINT isn't just data mining. Wiki article.
James Bamford's "Body of Secrets" mentions SIGINT was used on naval vessels to determine what kinds of submarines, etc. they were up against, merely by the radio frequencies and signals received. It's really cool stuff.
Robert Baer's "See No Evil" is the perfect explanation of why our intel community, especially on the HUMINT side, is so fucked right now.
Common perception in the 1980's was that the Japanese would own the US. The 1990's market crash took care of that. China?
What about WWII Wind Talkers. Language has its uses regardless of the style, formal or informal. How well would a formal English Rap video sell? Law is based on the premise of making language use understood. But, enigma is enigma. A smarter intelligence maybe required. Now Showing: Rap talkers in Kabul starring Samuel L. Jackson.
The book was by Robert Baer, and is called "See No Evil". I agree that it was very good.
Human SIGINT is flawed because, by definition, there's no such thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCollum_memo
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
The first whether analyse formulas tock over a week to calculate the next days whether. But bay using em you cold see if the predication what right and make them faster the next time.
With Iran, it's not that they'll get lost or stolen, it's that it puts the country possessing them in a much stronger diplomatic position. We already know that Iran is the main source of funding and weapons for most of the terrorism and unrest in the middle east (Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, etc). The main check on that is diplomatic (sanctions, etc) and military (threat of invasion) pressure on them. Right now, Iran could potentially be invaded by the US, or by some combination of middle eastern countries, but if they have deployable nukes, invasion by other middle eastern countries becomes essentially suicidal, and invasion by the US becomes exponentially more expensive, so much so that it would take really extraordinary circumstances for it to ever happen. Even small-scale military actions at sea or with their neighbors may have a different tone when backed by a nuclear arsenal.
In addition to that, all of the other middle eastern countries would feel pressure to either put themselves explicitly under the US's protection (not likely to be very popular), or to build their own nuclear weapons (just imagine a half-dozen marginally stable countries with nuclear arsenals).
And there's also the crazy wildcard - they've been threatening to nuke Israel for years now. Are they really crazy enough to actually do it? You wouldn't think so, but if you're Israel and one nuke would wipe your whole country out, are you really willing to bet your live and the fate of your nation that the rulers of Iran aren't that crazy? Hitler told everybody pretty much what he was going to do; nobody believed that he was really that crazy, and look what happened.
I don't reply to ACs
An individual person can't, the volume is too large, and the information is often dispersed. However, large networks of people could potentially gather and bring together that intelligence in a timely fashion so that it can be acted on. Obviously, this didn't happen before Pearl Harbor, or 9/11. But can this type of intelligence gathering be done in the real world- can we collect dispersed information, bring that information together, and do in hours, rather than days? The answer is "yes", and to see why, just look at the DARPA balloon challenge.
I really didn't get what DARPA's red balloons were all about until I read this article. It seemed sort of abstract, something about social networks. I suspect that this question (how do we collect and assemble those needles of intelligence from a vast haystack of noise?) is the question that DARPA is trying to answer with those balloons. In the case of Pearl Harbor, or 9/11, or the Fort Hood shootings, there was actionable intelligence. The problem was that there wasn't a mechanism to collect that intelligence; the people who knew the facts, and the people who needed the facts, didn't know each other. What DARPA asked was: how can we collect intelligence when the intelligence is held by different groups of people (think different government agencies, like CIA, NSA, FBI, Customs and Immigration, different governments, or just people in the streets) and those people don't know the people who need the information (higher-ups in Homeland Security or the White House)? We know what failure looks like (Pearl Harbor, 9/11) but what does success look like? How and why do certain intelligence-gathering systems actually work, when they do work?
Their unconventional approach here was to set up an intelligence problem (balloons dispersed all over the country, need to collect info within 24 hours) and then let other people figure out how to solve it. Obviously terrorists will not be painted bright red, clearly marked, and stationary, but the principles of effective network intelligence can be applied to more difficult problems. I suspect that DARPA is going to spend a lot of time studying the data about how the intel came in for these various efforts.
Straight out of my "Languages: Animal, Human, and Machine" class in '88 -
"A professor teaching a languages class once asserted, 'There is no double-positive in the English language that means the opposite, like the double-negative.' To which a student replied, 'Yeah, right!'"
Another test case:
Prat: "Everything I say is a lie!"
computer response: Erk!
human response: What a dick.
If I don't have the concept wrong, this is likely just the result of information coming from ECHELON. The later is a military project set up to monitor communications around the world, for the purpose of developing SIGINT. :P
Since it is usually illegal for the Government of a western democracy to spy on its citizens, the US, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand and Australia have reportedly arranged to spy on each others citizens and then report the results to the nation of that Citizen.
If this is true, then its entirely possible that your queries generated a report on Echelon and this was passed on to someone who decided to at least check out your IP and see what was reported back. It may even have been entirely automated and the results merely collated to see if anything could be developed from it. Entirely speculation on my part, and the whole concept of Echelon is subject to some doubt - although since I can imagine the possibility of it being built, and since having it built would be a significant SIGINT advantage, I can't imagine why it wouldn't be in existence. Theres a good likelihood it isn't called Echelon of course, I suspect thats more likely to be the name of one part of the whole thing - and I bet it doesn't run as smoothly as we would imagine it does
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_(signals_intelligence)
I find it fascinating. I also don't doubt the rumours mentioned in the Wikipedia article that imply it has been used to offer advantages to US companies. The US Gov't has a bit of a history of using military means to support US Corporations in the past, this would seem a natural extension of that. /. is concerned with the difficulty of filtering out relevant and important information, I would bet a lot of the data that has to be so filtered comes from ECHELON, and that the major problem it faces on a daily basis is the huge amount of data that has to be filtered to be of any use.
Since this article here on
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
> We know what failure looks like (Pearl Harbor, 9/11) but what does success look like? How and why do certain intelligence-
> gathering systems actually work, when they do work?
I think the problem here is that few want to admit the simple truth: Success looks no different than it ever did.
9/11 was no "failure of intelligence" it was just a tragedy. A tragedy engineered by human beings solving technical problems. The BEST you can ever hope to do, is change their plans. That's it really. You can change their target by making a target hard to hit. This makes protecting the vast majority of targets absolutely pointless. Does it matter if 200 people die on a plane or in an explosion on a subway? Dead is dead. Tragedy is Tragedy.
Then maybe, maybe, you can catch them sometimes. That is, if they are unlucky and you are lucky. If they do something stupid, and you happen to be watching. The vast majority of terrorist cases cracked were cracked either A) because the terrorists made mistakes or B) Good old fashioned police work turned something up.
In the end, terrorism is so incredibly rare that, ANY money or time that you spend on it is wasted. Its like spending time and money on a special batch of polio vaccine for yourself. Sure, it will protect you from polio. what were the chances that you were ever going to run into polio? Its an utter waste. Waste of time, waste of money.
Maybe a better analogy would be the lottery. Yes someone is going to hit. However, you shouldn't spend any time or money on preparing for what you will do when you hit the big one. Chances are, its not even going to happen to someone that you know. It makes just as little sense for the rest of the economy to make preparations aimed at selling you things once you win. The amount will be a pittance, even compared against a fairly local economy, AND chances are you wont even win anyway.
Unless you live in a place with an active conflict like Iraq, Afghanistan, or Isreal, THEN MAYBE it makes sense to take some precautions. Even then, it probably doesn't make any sense to take precautions, because you STILL are unlikely to ever be even marginally effected.
Its all just smoke and mirrors, and guess who is footing the bill?
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
I have a better how it should work.
Data mine to find out all the people working in SIGINT, send them pink slips, offer retraining into another field.
The pitfall is thinking that they should be doing this in the first place, or that its going to turn up anything mildly useful. I figure you have too many issues. The first is the false positive rate, the second is the false negative rate. Its worst than needle in a haystack. Its... find the specific gauge of sewing needle in the stack of hay AND assorted needles.
So for every real terrorist that turns up, your going to have a number of random people doing things that got flagged, and you will have to correctly sort them so that you both leave the normal people alone AND catch the terrorist. Your chances of doing either correctly are slim at best.
In the end, you MIGHT catch a terrorist or two. However, whats to say those aren't the ones who would have given up and moved on long before they did anything real? Whats to say they wouldn't have been caught in their plan, or their plan would have even worked?
Its a ridiculous proposition that you can set out to find them and do it. EVERY person working on it is a waste of a salary.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Nope iran needs to do it themselves so that they can truly understand the cost of Freedom.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
...but if you're Israel and one nuke would wipe your whole country out, are you really willing to bet your live and the fate of your nation that the rulers of Iran aren't that crazy? Hitler told everybody pretty much what he was going to do; nobody believed that he was really that crazy, and look what happened.
Er...you do realize that Israel has a considerable nuclear arsenal, right? And that includes submarines capable of launching nuclear-armed missiles after a strike at Israel itself. If Iran is truly threatening to "nuke" Israel, then they will stop doing so the moment they actually acquire their own nuclear capabilities—in other words, the moment when the Israelis could perceive it as a real threat. Right now, the Iranians are vulnerable to attack from either the United States or Israel, so they use aggressive rhetoric as a way to cover up their vulnerability.
Nukes are a no-edged sword; you can't use them, you can't even threaten to use them. The only thing nukes buy you is immunity from getting invaded. And since we gave the Iranians such a nice object lesson in what happens to countries that don't have nukes—I speak of Iraq—they'd be crazy not to be working on getting a nuclear capability as fast as they can.
The Iranians aren't crazy, except in the sense that everyone who opposes U.S. foreign policy is ipso facto deemed to be "crazy", I suppose. They don't want to be wiped out any more than Israel does, so they won't risk a nuclear exchange by attacking another nuclear power: nuclear weapons are a stabilizing force in geopolitics. Israel has nothing to worry about. They're still stronger than any possible combination of their enemies, and have the capability to take any invader down with them.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
but we did embargo the sale of u.s. oil to japan in retaliation for their move into southern indochina, which left them no choice but to seize the oil fields of the dutch east indies. and the only obstacle to that was the u.s. fleet @ pearl, making ww2 the 1st oil war.
so now _we're_ in the same oil-supply position as japan was, which is why we've been in the middle east since ww2, desert storm being the 2nd oil war...
They don't want to be wiped out any more than Israel does...
actually, I've seen enough talk about believing in the destiny of the end of the world that I wouldn't count on rational MAD behavior from everyone who can get their hands on an Iran nuke.
rd
"they just weren't big enough to take on the whole rest of the world"
indeed;-) i've always thought the german & jap. population was lulled into thinking they could take on the u.s.: maps of each country filled entire textbook pages, & they never noticed the different scales;-)
just like that bit in hhgg where arthur's words are carried thru a freak wormhole in the space-time continuum: "due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the entire battle fleet was accidentally swallowed by a small dog."
Fixed that for you. What is this, whine like an asshole day ? Every story is full of US focused ignorant babble. If you want this site to become Fox news, you're doing a "good job" of meeting the demographic.
I'm well aware that Israel is at least believed to have ballistic missile subs deployed. The trouble is, they don't do you a whole lot of good if your entire country has already been vaporized. All of the "official" nuclear powers are fairly large countries; a dozen nukes being used in any of them would be a horrible tragedy, but their life and culture would go on. Meanwhile, one or two would essentially wipe Israel off the map. Iran has sure been talking crazy (crazy meaning launching a nuclear first strike, regardless of what the consequences are likely to be), so it becomes a question of how much you're willing to bet that they aren't really that crazy.
The most common, and often valid, criticism of the West is that we don't really understand the cultures of the middle east. How many people are willing to bet the fate of their entire nation that when the leaders of Iran talk like they'd launch a nuclear first strike if they had the capability, they don't really mean it? There's no law of nature saying that nuclear weapons will never be used in anger again.
It may be technically true that having nukes means you won't ever be invaded, but I'd say the whole story is that having nukes means that if you piss off enough other countries badly enough, you're more likely to be nuked yourself rather then invaded. If Iran develops nukes, then the US would probably never seriously consider a conventional invasion. But we would be a lot more likely to consider a saturation nuclear strike against them followed by a mopping up invasion in the worst case scenario - worst case scenario meaning something like a smuggled nuke traced back to Iran being detonated in a US city. Actually, I guess the real worst case scenario is a smuggled nuke of indeterminate origin being detonated in a US city. In that case, we'd probably have to launch full-scale strikes against both North Korea and Iran, knowing that one of them is probably innocent. Yes, this stuff is pretty damn nasty, which is why I sure hope we can prevent Iran from getting nukes one way or another.
I don't reply to ACs
> And there's also the crazy wildcard - they've been threatening to nuke Israel for years now. Are they really crazy enough to actually do it? You wouldn't think so, but if you're Israel and one nuke would wipe your whole country out, are you really willing to bet your live and the fate of your nation that the rulers of Iran aren't that crazy? Hitler told everybody pretty much what he was going to do; nobody believed that he was really that crazy, and look what happened.
There are some buildings in Jerusalem that muslims consider to be holy. A country with about 90% muslims is unlikely to throw a nuke on such a place, or anywhere near it. Also godwin.
The whole reason that nukes are great as a defense is that nobody wants to be involved in a nuclear war.
Your theory depends on, assumes, rationality of all peoples; even the proud USSR, however, did not believe this of its own people--the reason they implemented a sophisticated system of checks and balances to satisfy, and keep from button-pressing, their own [powerful] psychos; it was also for Castro's begging 'let's nuke 'em' (the U.S.) that they pulled nukes off Cuba (not the presidential demand).
Islam, and its followers, which, and who are, hewing close to its, and their, zealous, pristine, roots isn't a force we want having nukes: even the most Islamic of Islamic countries (like Saudi Arabia) don't want this (because there the rulers are quite happy with their lives, and don't want rival threats); plenty of Iranians are quite reasonable these days, such that they wouldn't want nuclear war or to use a weapon unprovoked: but nobody trusts the fanatical government of Iran to be the same in this opinion--or going 'oops, we lost one or a couple, we don't know'; even Pakistan, which is relatively more stable (or has been), armed for years, and having decent (though tense) relations with the western world, has been (as we all know now) plagued with guarding their weapons, information regarding their creation, design, the process, etc..
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
Israel is so small that it would be relatively simple to dessimate the non-Islamic population centers without necessarily worrying of a considerable reprisal; what would Israel target, after all, Iran's central governing cities? (Which would be emptied, likely, before an attack.) Their non-central cities? (Where it is known, especially in Israel, that many people are more liberal--more 'live and let live'--than in the countryside which supports the Iranian regime?) What does one do on a sub when one's country has vanished, nuke or move-on? Nuke to show 'you shouldn't mess with [that which no longer exists]'? I'm probably looking at this too simply, I'll grant you, but again, 'Israel ain't big', and more importantly, 'one needn't target all of it, just certain population centers'.
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.