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Bruce Schneier: Why Collecting More Data Doesn't Increase Safety
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Bruce Schneier, security expert (and rational voice in the wilderness), explains in an editorial on CNN why 'Connecting the Dots' is a 'Hindsight Bias.' In heeding calls to increase the amount of surveillance data gathered and shared, agencies like the FBI have impaired their ability to discover actual threats, while guaranteeing erosion of personal and civil freedom. 'Piling more data onto the mix makes it harder, not easier. The best way to think of it is a needle-in-a-haystack problem; the last thing you want to do is increase the amount of hay you have to search through. The television show Person of Interest is fiction, not fact.'"
Television dramas that rely on forensic science to solve crimes are affecting the administration of justice via http://www.economist.com/node/15949089
they identified a lot of people on the cameras. a witness told them which guys were the culprits. the realtime videos did zilch to stop them from leaving bags unattended.
but the point really is that because they got so much intel, they ignored the intel which said that the guys were nutcases. they had a whole city of suspects beforehand so feds didn't spend any agents on surveillance on these guys.. which would have made it fairly obvious that they were gonna do something stupid, so they could have then allocated more agents on surveillance on the culprits, so they could have searched them when they were on their way to the marathon.
I mean, they do such ops monthly in Boston for catching pot dealers.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Hell my mom is real civic minded so went and did jury duty when she was called up...only to come in white as a sheet. She had spent 3 days hanging a jury on an arson case where even the investigator admitted on the stand he didn't know what caused the fire and that it didn't make sense for the defendant to burn it down as he didn't have enough insurance to even cover what he owed but the jury was 11 to 1 wanting to convict, why? "Because he is Italian and Italians are in the mob and burn things, haven't you ever seen Goodfellas?". That's right a guy was gonna get 10 years because of a scene in a Ray Liotta movie.
My faith in the human race needless to say went down several notches that day but you sir are correct, sadly many out there can't tell the difference between facts and what they have seen on screen.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.