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Bruce Schneier: Why Collecting More Data Doesn't Increase Safety

Posted by timothy on from the but-it's-only-wafer-thin dept.

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.'"

10 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Fiction, not fact. by Black+Parrot · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    --
    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    1. Re:Fiction, not fact. by auric_dude · · Score: 5, Informative

      Television dramas that rely on forensic science to solve crimes are affecting the administration of justice via http://www.economist.com/node/15949089

    2. Re:Fiction, not fact. by gl4ss · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.
    3. Re:Fiction, not fact. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Not really on either count, though there is certainly an idiot involved here--just not Schneier.

      The Boston guys were identified by having one camera showing one of the guys PLANTING THE DAMNED BOMB. Everything else was confirmation. Facial recognition did not help. Spying on people's cell phones did not help. All the high tech crap that law enforcement is always saying they need was almost totally useless, as would every other camera have been had one not been pointing at where one of the suspects planted explosives. If you start from the end point, it's kind of easy to work your way back. I'm not saying the other cameras were uselss, only that they were not useful in primary identification of the first suspect.

      Case in point: humans who work for the FBI do not particularly have, on average, better observation skills or vision than anybody else. What they did have was information they didn't share with anybody else at first, specifically the video of the planting of the explosive. Lacking that bit of rather important data, the Internet community tried to prove the value of social networking and crowdsourcing (because we all know those things are superior to absolutely everything, right?), and managed to incorrectly identify several people as suspects who had nothing to do with the bombing at all. In other words, they were spectacularly wrong in absolutely every detail. Despite my sincerest hopes, this will probably not be the knife that stabs social networking in the back, though a man can dream I suppose.

      Bottom line: having the video data available was useful. Having video data of a public place is not in and of itself privacy invading, especially when it's only looked at to solve an actual crime. What is privacy invading, and ultimately useless, is doing things like facial recognition, cell phone location tracking, and other things that build up a specific database of where people have been and at what time "just in case". That is the kind of thing we do NOT need more of, or any of, and this case proves exactly that, not the opposite. So the FBI won this battle, and good for them and for the rest of us that they did, but here's hoping that the method of that victory also helps them lose the war on privacy. Schneier is quite the genius.

    4. Re:Fiction, not fact. by icebike · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

      --
      Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
    5. Re:Fiction, not fact. by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

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      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  2. A lack of concern for freedom. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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).

  3. Re:Uh by maxwell+demon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  4. The opposite. by khasim · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Bruce Schneier facts by KugelKurt · · Score: 5, Funny

    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/