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.'"

Comments

Fiction, not fact.

[Black Parrot]

Good luck if he thinks he convince the American public that televised fiction isn't fact.

Re:Fiction, not fact.

[icebike]

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. ...
  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,

First, surveillance is not about prevention, it is ALWAYS about catching people after the fact.

You can't seriously be suggesting that the realtime video (it wasn't real time, it was recorded) should be enough to have a policeman appear the instant you take your backpack off and put it at your feet? Do you want to live in a society where there are actually enough cops for that?

The feds didn't spend ANY time surveilling these guys. They ask him some questions in 2011, and he gave all the right answers at the time. Do you really want to live in a society where the mere mention of your name gets you assigned a 24/7 surveillance team for YEARS AND YEARS into the future?

Thing about what you are suggesting. Wouldn't you be the first one to jump on Slashdot and bitch about an FBI team following you around because of something someone else said about you?

A lack of concern for freedom.

[Anonymous Coward]

The main problem here is that people just don't seem to care about freedom if they believe that something will keep them safe (or at least makes them feel safe). Even if it were true that the TSA, ubiquitous government surveillance, free speech zones, the Patriot Act, and warrantless surveillance in general kept people safe, that wouldn't make them any less wrong. Indeed, the main problem is that people seem to generally be spineless cowards who give up freedom for safety and are easily manipulated (especially after a disaster).

Re:Uh

[maxwell demon]

This is not a problem of statistics, this is a problem of identifying individual terrorists. Even if you could determine exactly how many terrorists there are, it would help you absolutely nothing to prevent the next terror act. You have to know who the terrorist is.

You can stare at the weather statistics of the last ten centuries as much as you want, it won't help you much when trying to predict when and where the next lightning will strike.

The opposite.

[khasim]

uh... I've always thought that to gain any meaningful stats, you need a large enough sample...

That works for trends. Not for the actions of individuals.

From TFA:

Rather than thinking of intelligence as a simple connect-the-dots picture, think of it as a million unnumbered pictures superimposed on top of each other.

He's a bit wrong there. It isn't a million unnumbered pictures. It's one picture per person in the country at the time. That's over 300 million pictures. Each one overlapping millions of other pictures.

uh... I've always thought that to gain any meaningful stats, you need a large enough sample...

And after a certain point you are just amplifying the "noise". And enough "noise" can appear to be a pattern.

It is only after an event that the "noise" can be filtered out and the extraneous pictures discarded.