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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.'"
Good luck if he thinks he convince the American public that televised fiction isn't fact.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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).
Yep. So the "compromise" could be lots of data collected but only kept for a short time (weeks, not years).
On the other hand, the frequency of any threats is so rare that do we really want to erode our liberties like this? Is regular police work just not capable of "connecting the dots" without this kind of surveillance?
Fascism begins when the efficiency of the Government becomes more important than the Rights of the People.
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 Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That works for trends. Not for the actions of individuals.
From TFA:
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.
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.
.. the collection of data helps after the fact, i.e., once someone is caught. The additional data allows a more solid case to be built, and makes it easier to find co-conspirators.
I'll buy that. Once you know who you can go back and sift through logs, security camera footage, peoples cell phone snaps, phone records, etc and find evidence. I don't Bruce would argue otherwise.
But...Where mass murder and terrorism is concerned what is our objective? Make sure we can punish the guilty or prevent attacks?
So far I am not aware of any revelation that has come out of all the surveillance that would have helped us 'prevent' the bombing. Plenty of things we might have done, but all things we already knew we could be doing but had rejected for reasons of civil liberties, cost, character of our nation etc.
Its also entirely possible that something that helps us identify and punish the guilty after the fact harms our ability to detect and prevent in terms of to much hay.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Didn't the FBI make a similar comment after it was revealed that they had questioned the Boston bomber in the past? Something to the effect that they could not follow up on every suspicisous character without turning the country into a police state.
So you are walking in thin ice, you could get big charges for something that you don't see as a crime (or see it as a joke or a prank). And people do weird things in that kind of situations,
Your sample should be large enough to have what you're looking for, but no larger. He mentions that the FBI has over 700,000 people on its watch list. They don't have enough people to investigate them all. If they could narrow down that list to 500 serious potential terrorists, their job would be a lot easier.
How to accomplish that? The simplest way is to catch them right before they are about to attack. For example, we could read the minds of individuals who are experienced in seeing the future, call them pre-cogs. Then when they are in agreement, we can catch the terrorist with our future crime force, lead by Tom Cruise.
Just kidding. Bruce Schneier doesn't give an plan on how to stop future terrorists, his point is that there's no reason to shred even more civil liberties in order to try to catch terrorists, especially since it probably won't help.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You REALLY think suicide bombers are bothered by the fact that you'll know they did it after they did it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The problem is that you cannot tell the needle from the hay until AFTER you pricked yourself.
Or, to get out of the idiom, you don't know what data is actually meaningful before the terrorist strikes.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Check your facts.
One (not both) had been questioned at the request of the russians. The russians refused to supply enough information about the nature of their prior request, and the FBI questions were answered satisfactorily.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Nah... we've been convinced of that since Blade Runner at the latest. Probably much earlier.
Bruce Schneier doesn't need to hide data with steganography - data hides from Bruce Schneier
Bruce Schneier knows who the Anonymous Coward is
Bruce Schneier can recite pi. Backwards.
Bruce Schneier can securely wipe any hard drive by shaking it like an etch-a-sketch.
Bruce Schneier knows Chuck Norris' private key.
Bruce Schneier can write a recursive program that proves the Riemann Hypothesis. In Malbolge.
Bruce Schneier can read captchas.
Hashes collide because they're swerving to avoid Bruce Schneier.
Bruce Schneier is the root of all certificates.
Bruce Schneier intercepts all your internal monologues by a man-in-the-middle attack.
http://www.schneierfacts.com/