Whistleblower: NSA Is So Overwhelmed With Data, It's No Longer Effective (zdnet.com)

An anonymous reader cites ZDNet's Zack Whittaker report: William Binney, a former NSA official who spent more than three decades at the agency, said the US government's mass surveillance programs have become so engorged with data that they are no longer effective, losing vital intelligence in the fray. That, he said, can -- and has -- led to terrorist attacks succeeding. Binney said that an analyst today can run one simple query across the NSA's various databases, only to become immediately overloaded with information. With about four billion people -- around two-thirds of the world's population -- under the NSA and partner agencies' watchful eyes, according to his estimates, there is too much data being collected. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why NSA wants to dump the phone records it gathered over the past 14 years.

Comments

One world government

[DontHackMeBro]

Never forget the ultimate objective: one world government. One world KGB. The NSA needs the help of Russia, China, etc to sort through all the data.

T.S.Eliot called it!

[Tim the Gecko]

"Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"

Re:T.S.Eliot called it!

[Anonymous Coward]

The Shadow (government) knows.

Re:T.S.Eliot called it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is the information we have lost in data?

Re:T.S.Eliot called it!

[Anonymous Coward]

So did Rand Paul

Old news

[Anonymous Coward]

This is named infoxication and is known for decades.

It's pays to scarf it all up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Like a trip to hell, one-way! Or Detroit!

Re:It's pays to scarf it all up!

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that the same?

Re:It's pays to scarf it all up!

[Archangel Michael]

either that or Chicago

Re:It's pays to scarf it all up!

[Foobar of Borg]

Like a trip to hell, one-way! Or Detroit!

Which reminds me

Search Tools

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds to me like their search and filtering capabilities are the problem, not the amount of data available.

Re:Search Tools

[Anonymous Coward]

False positives, false negatives.

If you have a correlation that gives an impossibly good 1% false positive rate and 1% false negative rate, you can expect that 1% of the subjects you are looking for will be overlooked and 1% of those who you are not concerned with will match. So, let's apply that to the current nuisance.
1% false negative: for every 100 people with hostile intent, 1 will slip through the net and either bomb something or be stopped by civilians.
1% false positive: for every 100 people without hostile intent, 1 will hit the flags anyway.
With a data set of roughly 4 billion people, and an expected upper bound on hostile actors measured in hundreds of thousands, there will be roughly 100 false positives for every true positive. (*/4, so about 25 to 400 false matches for every valid one)

If the real threat is smaller (numerically, not necessarily in regard to potential destructive ability), then the math just gets worse.

Re:Search Tools

[MightyMartian]

The problem isn't merely the volume of data. After all, LHC produces terabytes of data with each run. The problem is one of volume and variety. Imagine tracking every phone call made in the US, out of the US and into the US. We're talking about everything from calls to working spouses to pick up bread on the way home to ordering of products to sex chat calls and thousands of other topics. Filtering and searching those calls and the metadata surrounding them would be a monumental job of incredible complexity, with a high risk of false positives. Those false positives are what are going to kill filtering.

Having some experience with spam filters, I can see, at least in some limited way, how incredible difficult it would be trying to determine if any given call should be flagged for investigation. Those false positives are just going to swamp any filter unless the filter is made less discriminatory, and when you do that, you will then risk suspicious calls escaping the net.

Re:Search Tools

[Aighearach]

Even with good search tools, signal to noise ratio is still important.

Excess data with no correlation to the problems NSA is trying to solve (without getting into a debate over what those are) is simply noise.

Re:Search Tools

[burtosis]

While it is difficult, the article addresses information 10 years out of date. With enough computational power and progress in algorithms this will likely become less and less of an issue. Also it is trivial to cut away data you may not be interested in once you actually have some focus rather than treating it as a black box pre-crime device. An example is the phone data - while it may be impractical to speech to text every call over the last 14 years and use it to determine future attacks, having a pool of known terrorists and using the contact metadata going back that entire time may be extremely useful and very simple (by comparison) to piece together working relationships.

Re:Search Tools

[paiute]

having a pool of known terrorists

If we know who they are, why do we need all that data too?

Re:Search Tools

[Archangel Michael]

You have a number of assumptions, the worst of which is symmetric false reports (1% and 1%). The more likely scenario, which is also tunable (gets better with more data) is that it is asymmetric in nature, and thus the conclusion is not only inaccurate but terribly so.

It would have been MUCH better for you to not assume anything, and give general impressions of how the numbers might work. And 1% is way to high. You're more likely to see numbers in the "per 100,000" range (.000001 vs .01000), which is 1000 times different.

Re:Search Tools

[burtosis]

having a pool of known terrorists

If we know who they are, why do we need all that data too?

To find many more of them, any private or corporate or state supporters, and all associated people including family.

Re:Search Tools

[ShanghaiBill]

Even with good search tools, signal to noise ratio is still important.

The signal to noise ratio doesn't change when you merely use less data. The whole point of good search tools is to extract the signal from the data, and filter out the noise. If you believe that "less data, but better data" is the answer, then you should also believe that whatever algorithm you use to decide which data are "better" during the collection phase, can also be used to filter the existing data during the analysis. So collecting less data would not help.

The NSA may be wasting resources by collecting too much data, but TFA doesn't make a very good argument for that. Much of what the NSA collects is not used to predict, but to retroactively analyse events, so the perps can be identified.

Re:Search Tools

[Aighearach]

The signal to noise ratio doesn't change when you merely use less data.

False. Your statement is not true by default; it requires all the data to be known to be of equal quality.

Any time that some data is more strongly correlated than others, your noise is going to go down when you throw out the lower quality data.

Don't wave your hands, think it through and make a logical, reasoned argument.

Re:Search Tools

[TheCarp]

Of course there is a question of what do you count as a "false positive". Every time you make someone toss a box cutter in the trash where you wouldn't have before. Every time you arrest somebody where you would have let it slide before, every time one of those people wasn't a terrorist, that is a false positive. Or at the very least a side effect.

Re:Search Tools

[Dutch Gun]

Well, I probably contributed in some small way when talking with my brother on the phone a few nights ago. We were talking about the Apple case, NSA surveillance, etc, and I mentioned how just by saying "allahu akbar!" we'd probably set off a flag and get our conversation flagged for automatic transcription and further analysis.

Re:Search Tools

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they could build a machine to take care of the problem. It could be called, I dunno, The Machine, or something like a Greek city state, or something.

Re:Search Tools

[Anonymous Coward]

In a word: "data dredging"

There are two problems with building a pre-crime detector:

1) requirements(they want good enough outputs they can execute people/have the SWAT team raid their house without any additional HUMINT investigation BUT a single false positive OR false negative is unacceptable)
2) data sparsity(they have training data with ~5,000-10,000 samples that have almost nothing in common other than gender, religion, and age. There is no reason to believe that the hidden "radicalized AND active" boolean is even measurable with the data they've collected so far. They could easily be trying to measure the spin of an electron with reading glasses effectively...)

There are infinite permutations of filters that you could attempt to apply to the 300,000,000-7,000,000,000 individuals(with likely 100s of dimensions for each individual) they are trying to sort through. The computation expense of running even linear classifiers against that large of a dataset is extremely high.

Without a more targeted approach to cover the search space: they aren't going to beat a chess-bot by brute force exhaustive search.... They need good heuristics and so far all they've got is "young muslim male communicating with bad people on social media" to go on.

Re:Search Tools

[Tokolosh]

If only they had more money, they could solve the problem.

Re:Search Tools

[Jason Levine]

Oh, great. Now you've flagged this story in the NSA results as well as everyone commenting on it!

Re:Search Tools

[Anonymous Coward]

This cant be done.
You think, that the terrorist scene is some sort of rigid structure?
Somebody will do for them work for lets say 5 days and then starts doing something completeley different. Somebody else does work for them 10 years. How do you really track all the changes, all the people and connections? The falce-positive count will be astronomical.

BTW what is the "definition of terrorism"? Is it only some poor goat herder with "bad thinking". Or is it also Hillary Clinton with his leaked e-mails > "Clinton Emails Reveal Plan To Destroy Syria, Target Iran, Threaten Assad’s Family"?
Is this terrorism in writing?
>The best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad.

Re: Search Tools

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped reading at HUMINT. It's like listening to a kid trying to be cool by using military time.

Re:Search Tools

[ShanghaiBill]

your noise is going to go down when you throw out the lower quality data.

Except that if you have an algorithm for recognizing "lower quality data" then you can exclude that data from your search results. So it is not going to affect your results.

Re:Search Tools

[aldousd666]

Bayes FTW

Re:Search Tools

[rtb61]

The problem is errant and false data. No amount or search or filtering can clear up a poisoned data base. Bad data creates false association and relationships, which means bad results are generated by all searches. You can not clean up bad data without it also taking out good data, you can not get good data without also getting flooded out by bad data. If fact the best defence against those deep total data acquisition system is to simply generate false data and allow those systems to flood themselves with it. Computers can for more readily generate false data than they can acquire, store and collate it and rejecting bad data means, that data must be actually analysed, each and every instance of it.

So say the US government wants to track all potential Chinese espionage agents, simplest defence the government of China simply makes all Chinese citizens look like potential espionage agents (purposefully leaky data bases ie honey pots with false data, everywhere, it's just a cheap box but it can contain data that will cost millions of dollars to analyse) and the US government is back to square 1.

The sheer volume of bullshit data that computers can generate is basically infinite, just look at main stream media News, what a joke. Of course people are learning to reject it all based upon the source, basically just ignore it, especially when espionage agents produce it against their own citizens (US main stream media, what a mess). In the espionage world this is much more complex because of course false data is used to hide real data and hence you get bogged down in too much data. Sort of like the bullshit espionage agents try to spread in main stream media, of course unlike the spy vs spy sources, we can just turn around and ignore that entire corrupted source and go elsewhere (So main stream news is corrupted shite and main stream NGOs are corrupted shite, so just ignore them and let them go belly up full of US/UK espionage agents, investors will not be impressed).

Re:Search Tools

[jtayon]

Big data technology suffer the same issue.

Privacy concerns solve themselves with time.

Re:Search Tools

[Anonymous Coward]

So how would burner-phones and false identities be handled?

It's easy to hide in a crowd, and with a crowd of 4 billion people where you maybe have 50000 people that are bad enough you want to track them it becomes quite hard...

It's all a cat and mouse game.. For each improvement that is made in the monitoring the more secretive the bad people will get..
Just speculation, but maybe without collecting all the call-metadata maybe there would be less use of burner-phones so when some suspect where arrested the actual history of phone-calls would be relevant..

Re:Search Tools

[Anonymous Coward]

But when the collection of data affects how the people being monitored behave it actually lowers the quality of the data.

Re:Search Tools

[Anonymous Coward]

With all the unemployment in the US maybe they could solve 2 problems with one solution.

Re:Search Tools

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy, the Bin Laden family and their friends the Bush family.

Go get 'em coppas!!

Re: Search Tools

[Anonymous Coward]

Which can ironically create future malcontents! XD

Re: Search Tools

[Anonymous Coward]

Naw, I think they get a Psycho-pass this time!

What if it was streamable

[Anonymous Coward]

What if there was a way to mark the data in a stream, not storing it permanently but being able to refer to the markers during a specific period of relevance?

Re:What if it was streamable

[Anonymous Coward]

Somebody's been reading too many books on computer science from the 80's and 90's.

Make it available to the world

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's pretty clear by now that people have nothing to hide. I'd like to listen to my neighbors phone conversations too.

Oh but it is effective...

[Anonymous Coward]

... they want a google database of peoples data/chats/records and behavior they can use against them at any time for political purposes.

Our brains are much worse at reality and thinking than thought.
Science on reasoning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

The (mass surveillance) by the NSA and abuse by law enforcement is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ZyJw_cHJY

Brezinski at a press conference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWTIZBCQ79g

Major powers, and imposing control over the awakened masses.

https://youtu.be/4usbR_kKCDs?t=397/a>

Important:

Greece coup

Re:Oh but it is effective...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well looks like someone at NSA got some mod points that this was downvoted...

Re:Oh but it is effective...

[Anonymous Coward]

You need the final step. You're close. Try

they want a google database that they claim has peoples data/chats/records and behavior they can use against them at any time for political purposes

Remember, for national security purposes they will never show a single piece of evidence from this database. Instead, they intend to use the EXISTENCE of this database against people. "I have here in my database a list of 205 terrorists!" (Parallels are multiple: McCarthy refused to reveal any source of his list, and by the time of the Tydings hearings the list had shrunk substantially) The effectiveness of this plan requires that the public believe that "the database" knows all and sees all.

Its not about before the act.

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not about doing things before a terrorist attack. Its not about finding those who are intent on harming the USA. Its not about finding those who wish to harm citizens. That has never been the goal.

It IS about being able to destroy someone's life after they come to the attention of the bureaucrats. And its marvelously successful at that. Hell they even admit that's their goal when they talk about having a time machine and going back in time after an event.

oh boy, time to make money

[iggymanz]

Let's give them the "Big Data!" and "Analytics!" spiel that all the marketing wanks are cramming down our throats. Sounds bites and spending huge bucks on them is the solution!

Re:oh boy, time to make money

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you never learned enough statistics to understand machine learning algorithms doesn't mean they don't work.

Re:oh boy, time to make money

[Anonymous Coward]

This article is basically flat out saying "they don't work"

Whether or not it's true is a totally different question.

Re:oh boy, time to make money

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the article is saying the data collected (largely meta data, not transcripts for the paranoid) is useless and was never examined.

Re:oh boy, time to make money

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is blatantly false, because the aforementioned machine-learning algorithms can make great strides in making sense of it.

Is this a circular argument or am I missing something?

Re:oh boy, time to make money

[iggymanz]

you make an assertion without a shred of proof and without knowledge of either the structures of the data nor the tools they currently use on it. are you a Big Data marketing wank? you reason like one.

Re:oh boy, time to make money

[Anonymous Coward]

Machine learning does work for certain problems. Reading the soul of a young muslim and predicting if he is just another one of ~25% of muslims that believe that terrorist attacks are somewhat justified, one of the ~5-65% of muslim teenage boys fantasizing about being a toy soldier(for which side? have we decided who the bad guys are yet?), one of the ~1% of muslim teenage boys who are contemplating carrying out attacks against civillians, OR one of the ~.00001% of muslim teenage boys who WILL attempt to carry out such an attack WITHOUT being approached by an FBI agent vs. IF approached by an actual recruiter from a terrorist organization.

Just watching live leak videos of IEDs blowing up humvees/snipers killing coalition soldiers isn't enough. Googling "Inspire magazine" isn't enough. Gmail newsletter subscriptions for anti-american propaganda isn't enough. Purchasing a pressure cooker isn't enough. Following ISIS accounts on twitter isn't enough. Buying firearms and reloading supplies isn't enough. None of these things are enough by themselves, and it's very challenging to find the correct combination of features/thresholds to start spamming them with Google Adwords for "Promising career opportunities with ISIS".

Ironically, burner phones refilled with cash seem to be the current best approach to distinguish between a dumb teenager with religious convictions and an "active threat" however there are tons of drug dealers/illegal immigrants using prepaid VISAs and Tracphones to sift through, so it isn't exactly a slam dunk.

Re:oh boy, time to make money

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a completely different argument. To the guy above who said

you make an assertion without a shred of proof and without knowledge of either the structures of the data nor the tools they currently use on it. are you a Big Data marketing wank? you reason like one.

... you obviously don't even know what the f*** you're talking about, so let the adults talk.

Anyway, data mining can never make these predictions about terrorism because it is a crime of passion. The difference between committing a crime of passion and not committing one could be as simple as which way the wind was blowing that morning. It is all in the mind of the perpetrator. Without fully mapping the subconscious of every human, we can't do it. Even if we fully map everyone's subconscious, we still can't do better than probabilities. So it's morally, ethically, and factually wrong to use data mining on such problems.

Rant over.

Re:oh boy, time to make money

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever i travel i usually buy a local prepaid sim-card, usually for cash, to be able to make local calls a bit cheaper and get some data-allowance.. Probably lots of people doing the same or else those prepaid cards would have disappeared from the market..

When traveling i usually withdraw money from a known bank's ATM and then use cash during the whole trip to be able to know the exchange-rate for when handing in the expense-report.. Depending on what card i use i either have 2% extra on each purchase and/or a fixed $5 charge for each cash-withdrawal.

Wait a minute...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Is this guy saying that the NSA used to be effective? I do remember them doing good work back when they emphasized playing defense; and they have probably assisted with some really juicy targeted attacks on specific people of interest(whether criminals or well-placed figures in governments we are interested in getting to know better); but has the Total Information Awareness/dragnet-all-the-data stuff ever shown the slightest evidence of providing useful data?

Re:Wait a minute...

[Megol]

Who knows? Not us, it's classified. It may have helped much in whatever NSA is targeted to or have been totally useless. I don't think that question is that interesting though, the important question is what are the costs of the program. And I'm not talking money - trust, morality and freedoms are worth much more.

Re:Wait a minute...

[F.Ultra]

I actually think that we do know because if they (either NSA och the CIA) would ever have found anything it would have been posted all over the media. To really win over the population and get even more funds all they need is that one true case, that they haven't announced that tells me that they have none to show and instead they play the "if only we could tell you what we know" card.

Re:Wait a minute...

[gweihir]

At least not against terrorism. These people would have turned up in the legal system if caught. AFAIK no actual terrorist act has ever been prevented by the NSA and there would at least be a few were we know about if they were actually effective in that area. On the other hand, their shoddy targeting information for state-sponsored murder has probably created a few terrorists.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll start this by saying I detest our US government's ongoing disrespect for Constitutional boundaries. By "US Government" I mean exactly that: Legislative, Judicial, Executive.

The intelligence community doesn't generally trumpet its victories for a handful of reasons, primarily for operational security. If your opposition has data on your wins, the smart ones can ascertain how you did it. (Think about sports teams studying their opponents past games). Another is follow-on missions. For all the mystifying that Hollywood and TV does, counter-terrorism isn't that much different than police work. Uncovering something almost always leads to something else. To that end the majority of cases are inter-related and exposing information about one risks compromising a related on-going case.

Re:Wait a minute...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is not one documented, credible case of the information spying apparatus preventing a terror attack or catching a terrorist. I'm talking about the mass, undirected eavesdropping you understand. Targeted surveillance has always been effective and continues to be.

As I recall the NSA attempted to justify mass surveillance a few years back. Their first estimate of suspects caught was huge, in the thousands or more. As people started asking clear questions about this nebulous figure, the estimates shrank dramatically. Eventually it went down to 3, and the story was that there were several lines of evidence and multiple investigative angles used against the 3. In other words mass surveillance didn't make the difference and only reinforced what was already known about the 3 suspects.

The unpleasant reality is that there are NO documented, clear cases where mass surveillance made any difference. The whole program is a bloated boondoggle that undermines civil rights, treats all citizens as 'terror suspects', and distracts analytical attention away from important, actionable intelligence. And it has caused long-term reputational damage to the Three Letter Agencies.

But hey, their budgets and staff count went up so it's a win, right?

Re:Wait a minute...

[gweihir]

But hey, their budgets and staff count went up so it's a win, right?

If they do not regard themselves as part of the society they help destroy, sure.

Total lie

[axewolf]

What are we supposed to think from this? That we need to pour more money into mass surveillance to aid data analysis to keep us safe? This is a obvious example of the ongoing damage control. All of the recent stories concerning the NSA seem to be dancing around the main point: our government has been proven to steal information from all of us. They have been monitoring and recording all electronic communications for years. This isn't just a breach of trust. This is a complete annihilation of trust for anyone who has the ability to reason. Nothing anyone says who is or was involved with intelligence is credible. The conclusion that must be drawn to preserve freedom is that the government is an mortal enemy to the vast majority of people. This bitter idea needs to be made palatable to everyone. Only then can reform be enacted.

Re:Total lie

[Anonymous Coward]

So stopped reading after think, I don't wanna think! You use too big a words. Makes me confused, upset, angry. I'll just vote for the color my parents told me to vote for, they were smart and told me the other color can't be trusted. Now I've done my civic duty I'll go drink a beer and watching some sports game on my safety box. signed the 99% (of voters)

Re:Total lie

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing anyone says who is or was involved with intelligence is credible.

My standard quote which almost always provokes an extended silence:

"To be a spy, you need to be: duplicitous, lying, priviledged and entitled, subversive, secretive, meddling, dishonest, untrustworthy, paranoid and cowardly.

It's their job to decieve. Therefore, nothing any spy says or does can be trusted. Ever. This includes whistleblowers, such as Snowden.

Yet we bank our security on these people!"

Flood Them Until They Drown.

[zenlessyank]

They need moar datas. Everybody call up someone in a country we don't like and ask them how their cat is doing. Ask for tech support from China for the missing buttons on that shirt you just bought from Wal-Mart. Find out when the lights change at an intersection in some obscure town.

Re:Flood Them Until They Drown.

[Jason Levine]

Step 1: Develop open-source AI that can carry on rudimentary conversations - occasionally peppering in some words like "bomb" or "ISIS" to trigger NSA searches.
Step 2: Have people register multiple VoIP accounts to run the AIs on.
Step 3. AIs call each other, have conversations, and hang up to call the next AI. (This step repeats ad infinitum.)
Step 4. Sit back and watch as the NSA's servers burst from too much data.

DUH!

[Lumpy]

The NSA and FBI etc are trivial to thwart.. I did it to my ex NSA professor at college.

I bet him a solid 4.0 in his class that I could get an encrypted message past him and he would not be able to detect it. He agreed.

I sent him 10 files 1 had a message that I encrypted. the other 9 had the contents of /dev/random encrypted into them that matched the same bit length message all encryption blocks were 100% identical in size.

I won and was told I cheated.... I asked him if Spies follow rules and get in trouble if they cheat....

Re:DUH!

[Anonymous Coward]

He still knew he was seeing at least one encrypted message. I say you failed. You should have just blasted encrypted wifi signals at his forehead, he wouldn't have noticed.

Re:DUH!

[Jason Levine]

Interesting. Applying this example in a completely different area, I've said that we might not recognize signals from alien life because they would be using alien encryption/compression/protocols that might be indistinguishable from random "data." If your professor couldn't tell which of the 10 human encoded files had real data and what it was, what's the chance of us telling that some signal is actually an alien's video file in an alien codec using an alien compression/encryption algorithm?

Re:DUH!

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet him a solid 4.0 in his class... He agreed.

I'll take 5 mod points in "Things that didn't happen." Alex.

Re:DUH!

[Lumpy]

Absolutely, spread spectrum communication is very hard to detect, and we are currently only looking for intentional beacons on a specific frequency based on a scientific guess.

Also looking for signals not beamed into space at insane power levels is pretty much impossible for us. even if a standard 100,000 watt omnidirectional TV transmitter was only 1 light year away we would never be able to detect it's signal because of the inverse square law will put the signal below the background noise well before it got here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Once you do the math even on a 1 million watt transmitter, it becomes obvious why we can't hear any alien routine communications. an alien race 100 lightyears away would need to tightly beam the signal directly at us with such immense power that it would be a large government funded project.

And that assumes a simple Carrier wave transmission. if aliens are anywhere advanced as we are, there are communication modes that are difficult to detect even when you are near them because of how wide of a spectrum they use or they hop around in frequency so fast.

Re:DUH!

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I had thought it would be obvious to use deltas from true randomness to check whether something had info in it, but I don't think that's what they do.

Sun Tzu had it right 3000 years ago

[BoRegardless]

He wanted plenty of spies! They were far cheaper than tons of warriors and all their food supplies and equipment.

Re:Sun Tzu had it right 3000 years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

He also said that:
The one's biggest strength is their biggest weakness

Re:Sun Tzu had it right 3000 years ago

[Gryle]

Generals throughout the years have understood the effectiveness of good intelligence. George Washington is said to have remarked "I do not fear the enemy; I fear his spies" based on effectiveness of his own spies, the Culper Ring.

Shhhh! Everyone stop typing so much!

[Narcocide]

You insensitive clods! The NSA is having trouble keeping up with all your jibber-jabber!

Re: Shhhh! Everyone stop typing so much!

[Anonymous Coward]

Best thing is to shutdown Slashdot, and the amount of useful data will be much higher ;-)

Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

One world government does not automatically mean global authoritarian nightmare. I get it, you are against a world government, but either stay on topic or, without conflating such a government with authoritarianism as if such a relation were a self evident fact, explain why the two should be considered related - please.

Put simply, what the hell sort of problem do you have with some consistency in global law? Not every law, but some. Recall such a government does not mean that smaller governments, like states or provincial governments under a national government, wouldn't still exist. You can still have a backwards local flavor if you so desperately want it.

Otherwise shut the fuck up, and stay on topic. The topic in case you need some elucidation is the surveillance done by one national government and the difficulty of it processing the data is has collected. Said topic naturally extends itself to whether or not said government should have the data, and the logistics of handling said data. It does not extend itself to the unrelated matter of a world government, unless you care to post your anti-world-government manifesto and link the two.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[kheldan]

How about YOU shut the fuck up? You're no better than a tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist; you represent the other end of the same gods-be-damned scale, and as such is equally elligible to be ignored.

The real problem? An ages-old human tendency: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Knowledge is power. Also, power seeks more power. These are no-brainers; no tinfoil hat required; everyone knows this. The NSA (and pretty much every other 'intellgence' organization) always wants more, more, more information, even if they can't use it -- but still they want more. They're like a little kid who discovered sugary candy; it's up to the parents to tell them no. Here in the U.S., citizens must play the role of Parents -- but we haven't been doing our job. The NSA/CIA/FBI/{insert government agency here} has been holding their breath until they turn blue, pitching fits, and throwing their dinner on the floor (read as: doing everything and anything they can to keep us in a constant state of terror) so we'll just give them the candy they want (read as: ability to surveil anyone and everyone) to keep them quiet. What they need at this point is a good spanking on their spoiled little bottoms (read as: U.S. citizens speak the hell up to their representatives and tell them in no uncertain terms that mass surveillance has to stop!) and send them to their room for a good long spell without dessert (no more data for you!). It needed to be done years ago but we've been neglectful, overly-permissive parents. Time to fix that!

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

One world government does not automatically mean global authoritarian nightmare.

Yes, it actually does. It also means that there would be no place to escape from such tyranny.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[wyHunter]

Hear, hear. Mr. Anonymous Coward is no doubt a liberal, who believes that power is generated by burning unicorn farts and if we all sing Kumbaya together all will be well.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

I see, you want to say I'm no better than you. You're wrong. Power corrupts is a notion with anecdotal evidence. We point to examples of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao with such ease, as well as those who bend so easily to money, but what of presidents, prime ministers, legislators, governors, mayors, bosses, priest [who aren't fondling the little ones], and arguably the vast majority who do not overstep the bounds of their office?

Admit it, you're just against government but also recognize that that view won't fly, so you speak of the extremities to fight any bit of it you can. If you were objective, you would recognize the utility of government on all levels, and work towards its betterment. You would speak of new policies, not spankings.

We're not parents. We're the people. We are ultimately a part of the government, and yes, we're responsible for its conduct. So if you want to begin spanking someone, a mirror may help you with the effort.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[DontHackMeBro]

Maybe I am one of those rare specimens who don't want their children growing up in a world where we are all living in some kind of Soviet Russia redux.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

One world government does not automatically mean global authoritarian nightmare

I don't see how it happen in any other way. Absolute power will very timely bring an absolute corruption with it, and there will be nowhere to run.

stay on topic

They have 4 billion people -- every homo sapiens with a computer -- under their surveillance. They are part of a government that can summon or abduct a human from any part of the world for waterboarding. This starts to resemble world government more and more.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't you heard? Until we have one unified World Government, the aliens will refuse to contact us!

How will we ever be offered membership in the Federation?

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

Look, I have things I must do and clearly /. is so overzealous nowadays that people feel the need to include disclaimers. In such a climate we can't have an honest and frank discussion about anything, and you will no doubt mark this as a win despite knowing it isn't - and there is no such thing.

I will say I find it amusing that you said power corrupts, but then appealed to parental authority without noticing the inherent conflict in your position. Parents are quite powerful. You want to tell me mommy is corrupt?

I have a life to tend to, but dance puppet, dance.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Archangel Michael]

Here in the U.S., citizens must play the role of Parents

Too many children turns everything into the Lord of the Flies. Which Is where I fear we are heading.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think governments scale well. The larger the structure the less the possibility of oversight. Why is it that the Canadian government can get things done that the US can't? I suspect dunbar's number is the answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

Re:Don't conflate those things

[TechyImmigrant]

I don't think governments scale well. The larger the structure the less the possibility of oversight. Why is it that the Canadian government can get things done that the US can't? I suspect dunbar's number is the answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Or just that it's a Parliamentary system, where the party with the majority chooses the leader and so the party and leader in power are actually in power.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[MitchDev]

" Power corrupts is a notion with anecdotal evidence." The actual saying is that "Absolute Power corrupts absolutely." Which is utter bullshit. If you have actual "Absolute Power" then you decide what is right and wrong, there is no "corruption" as no one can challenge you. Now the desire for more power on the other hand...

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason the U.S. government can't get anything done these days is this Republican idea that Government isn't good for anything. This leads to putting people in charge of government agencies that don't believe that government can do anything. Think back to Heckofajob Brownie during hurricane Katrina. The guy had no emergency management experience and ended up running the worlds largest emergency management organization. This is pervasive through many agencies though and leads to a self fulfilling prophecy.

We were able to effectively end childhood hunger in the 70s, we were able to create the national highway system, put a man on the moon, lots and lots of large projects that were ultimately very successful but now a large chunk of the country thinks we don't even need the IRS anymore. We have a Presidential candidate campaigning on that very idea. Cruz is probably equally as crazy as Trump but they represent a good solid chunk of the population.

I hate how the conversation has been turned into Government should do everything versus nothing. That's why I like Bernie, he thinks Government could do more but recognizes that some things are better in private hands, he probably goes too far but when you think of it more as a direction instead of an overnight mandate things look a whole lot more sane. My health or my parent's health should not come down ensuring someone makes a profit for a hospital stay. Injecting money into health is counter productive, much the same way insurance is. Insurance companies should take our money and use it to invest, but they have people who's job it is to deny you your claim rather than figuring out how to fairly deal with a situation. So we pay care insurance for years and don't use our benefits, the moment we have a traffic accident we have to start paying more, or we have to hire a lawyer to make sure the insurance company actually provides the coverage they promised.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

If Dunbar's number was the answer, Canada would be as hobbled as the U.S.

I suspect the Canadian government can get as much done as it can not because of their having a tenth of the population, but of the greater homogeneity. I don't mean specifically language or even race, but Canadians largely identify themselves as Canadians. Let's leave the Quebec matter out for the time being, and just simply recognize they're still in.

Americans on the other hand identify themselves as left or right; Democratic, Republican, Independent, Libertarian, Green, other; North, South, East, West, Middle America; gay, bisexual, straight; and so on, let's not even get into religion. It's not that Canadians don't have these distinctions, but it's not usually the foremost thought for any one. Put simply, Americans are "playing" for "the home team" when they vote or act, or when our politicians act. It's us versus a great many thems.

The E.U. sees a similar problem.

Canadians tend to be of the "for Canada" mentality, and more willing to compromise to get things done. Americans have largely lost that.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

Could it be so simple? It might. The obstructionism that both parties engage in when their party doesn't control the House, Senate, and White House altogether is paralyzing. We're hashing through the same shit we were in the early 90s, but neither "side" will let the other fully implement any idea for fear not of the effect, but of it working.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, but you never have absolute power. A lot of places is such that you can get 'power enough to cover up', or 'power enough to bribe the supreme court'. Not absolute power, but power enough to rule through corruption. Even despots depends on a loyal inner circle. They rely on larger amounts of people to prevent revolution - and so on.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

They have 4 billion people -- every homo sapiens with a computer -- under their surveillance. They are part of a government that can summon or abduct a human from any part of the world for waterboarding. This starts to resemble world government more and more.

Bah. They may have omnipresent surveillance - but they are also impotent. You would think all this surveillance would give them the definitive upper hand to stamp out IS? Nope. They, and lots of other organizations the U.S. dislikes continue to operate. The Americans even have mafia & street gangs inside their own country. (Lots of other countries doesn't have that.) Quite pathetic if "world domination" was any kind of goal here.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

But when people flee from tyranny, numbnuts like you don't want them in your country.

smh

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just the Republicans. Both are this way. Lets give the people what they want but only if it works for us.
Look at the health care. It now great for those that didn't have it. But for those that had it the cost went up and not just a little.

Bernie everything will be free. The only question that I haven't seen answered is how is everything going to be paid for?

Re:Don't conflate those things

[cfalcon]

> Put simply, what the hell sort of problem do you have with some consistency in global law?

I'll bet you anything you're not ok with the second amendment, and would want to eliminate it.

People are different.
Cultures are different.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[tnk1]

For some value of "working". Many of the objections to health care, for instance, aren't that we're going to immediately implode from free health care. It's that 50 years down the line, we'll have completely fucked it up. And there is plenty of evidence to show that this could happen.

Add to that the observation that any entitlement that gets into place will become permanent because it will quickly create dependency among voters. What person near retirement age is going to vote to overhaul Social Security? They won't risk it. They want their promised retirement. Who will vote to overturn a mediocre single payer system or even reform it if the politicians have you convinced that reform will destroy your health care. No one would ever get elected who would do that.

So yeah, it will work just long enough to create dependency. And that's why no one even wants to give it a chance. And I don't really blame them, because history has shown that it will become untouchable, even if in dire need of reform.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[tnk1]

Both size and homogeneity are critical factors in successful programs. Look at Canada or Denmark... or New Hampshire. Small populations, not very much actual diversity.

They also don't have the same traditions as the US as a whole. I daresay, it has helped them in some ways, but I think some of this is also what allows us to be a leading country rather than a country content to fall into line. We have the ambition to do things, which makes us loud and brash, but also got us to the Moon.

Mostly, I think it is the attitude that we'd rather do for ourselves, and not have it done for us, even if it makes us less content and lacking in certain creature comforts provided by a paternalistic state.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

A person can't decide if something is right or wrong, only legal or illegal. Right and wrong is an ethics discussion.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[BlueStrat]

One world government does not automatically mean global authoritarian nightmare.

Yes, it actually does. It also means that there would be no place to escape from such tyranny.

But when people flee from tyranny, numbnuts like you don't want them in your country.

smh

Yes, because nearly-open borders have worked out so well recently in Belgium and France and other places in the EU.

Only an irresponsible fool allows any random stranger off the street to enter their home with all their loved ones' lives and all their possessions at risk.

smi (so many idiots)

Strat

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Darinbob]

Some of the most persistently corrupt governments are local governments. For example, in China the biggest corruption problems are with regional and local officials rather than with the central party. Larger governments get more scrutiny so that corruption is known publicly instead of being secret, local governments often don't even get local citizens to show up to vote and so end up being more easily controlled by special interests. Not saying that I'm all in favor of giant centralized governments but just that I don't think that increased size of government increases the amount of corruption.

Another example, look at many current multinational organizations which seem to have relatively low effectiveness or power. The UN, Interpol, etc. The ones that do seem to have reasonable amount of power tend to be economic (World Bank).

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Darinbob]

But we have so many examples of smaller government bodies having ineffectual oversight. In American everyone's paying attention to the presidential election but so few are worrying about who's getting elected to their local school board and city council. In California we've had several municipalities that went bankrupt or nearly so based upon just a few individuals controlling the money and investing it badly, or a few individuals making broad decisions about long term retirement benefits for city workers, all of those decisions having little public scrutiny, but at the California state level there are so many eyes within and without that it seems difficult to imagine those same problems occuring at that level, there's no single money manager with authority to screw it up. Meanwhile you can have a school board run for years as a virtual dictatorship.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Darinbob]

I think politics insists on having a tug of war contest. So if you try to win your tug of war by standing in the center and holding the middle of the rope you'll never accomplish anything, so the game show contestants running for office stake out extremists positions by default. Many of them then lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of the country is in between those extremes. So Bernie is a good counterbalance to Cruz.

The point of insurance, in the minds of insurance companies, is to create income for them. Monthly payments come in, zero payments go out. If there ever is a payment paid out then changes are made to prevent such future mistakes. It's honestly their way of thinking. In graduate school we worked hard on our student council to get health care for all of us, lots of long hours setting up student elections for it so they could vote on whether or not they were willing to add the fee, and so forth. We win the election, we select our insurance provider, and things go great for a year. But one baby was born with a heart defect that year and the damn insurance company declares that we're too expensive and they dropped us, leaving us back at square one. We were grad students, overall that's a pretty safe bet on the actuarial tables I would think, but because they had to pay out they refused to take anymore bets. It's an evil industry.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to try and play a logical debating card, you should probably try to get the quote right yourself. It's actually "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Your argument is no argument at all.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[dbIII]

Exactly - "small government" is where corruption usually happens. Some sort of oversight is needed if you don't want the people you voted for running off with the silver. If all you've got is local police and their boss is on the take what can you do?

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Darinbob]

Today we think of corruption as something like having our decisions swayed by outside money, bribes, special interests, nepotism, etc. But the meaning of the word corruption is broader than the modern usage. Corruption is also the word used for decay and putrefaction. So absolute power metaphorically causes your ideals to decay, your morals to decay, and putrefaction of the soul.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Darinbob]

Welcome to Slashdot. Two drink minimum.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

Playing devil's advocate: Some cultures practice female genital mutilation. Some endorse pedophilia. Some cultures engage in genocide. Some cultures eat their dead. Some cultures practice slavery.

Not every cultural norm is worth preserving.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[jbengt]

Wrong again. The actual quote, by Baron Acton, according to Wikipedia, is "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."

Re:Don't conflate those things

[aldousd666]

Absolute power hasn't failed! It's never been tried!

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

GP here. Actually, I have no problems with accepting refugees.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I might have one AC post left for tonight. The US GDP is to the tune of some $12 trillion dollars per year. That's how much we produce. Funding a universal basic income, which is probably not something that Sanders would realistically shoot for, would cost somewhere around $3-4 trillion dollars per year depending on how we handle children.

My back of the envelope calculation was based on the UBI being $800/person/month. I've been able to live decently in flyover country on that much before, and I'm confident I could do it again, especially with a roommate.

The side effect is that we'd have to be prepared for a massive paradigm shift in wages. We could eliminate the minimum wage. Most line workers where I work would perhaps be payed $2-4/hr with such a scheme, which remember is in addition to the UBI. Myself, I'd probably wind up paid $10-15/hr. I make the median wage where I live so I don't really feel bad about being honest about the modest amount I make. I could make more with my skills, but I would never have the job security I presently enjoy.

We can afford it if we wanted to do it tomorrow. We'll need to do it eventually simply because the remaining jobs after another 50 years of automation will be beyond the intellectual and creative capacities of probably 90% of the population. I'm not comfortable letting them starve because I happened to be born with a brain that's capable of constructing the AI that will automate their jobs away. They will not be able to do my job as a robot technician. While my darker side sometimes relishes in the idea of my automations making idiots starve in gutters, I cannot ethically justify it when my automotons are providers of plenty, and there is the practical concern that they would rather kill me and smash my automotons to bits just to go back to being subsistence farmers. So my mind has a 2/3 vote in favor of UBI and a 1/3 vote against it. That's just me personally. Who knows? Maybe humans are better off spiritually as subsistence farmers. They seem to reap great value and meaning from that way of life. I only hope to offer them something better and let them choose in the end whether they accept it or reject it. To that end, all I can do is post on Slashdot.

There are two primary advantages to UBI I can see. Secondly, even if I mention it first, is the elimination of bureaucracy. Nobody will need to endure the humiliating process of qualifying for disability, which is the closest thing we have to UBI, at least if you have specific conditions a, b, or c that we've decided entitle you to live for free. Perhaps it's a personal bias, but I hate bureaucrats. First and foremost, however, is the synergy that a UBI has with the free market.

I am currently allowing a person to live practically for free. They are developing a game. It may flop. It may become an overnight phenomenon. All I know is that this person has talents I couldn't even imagine having. They are a programmer, an artist, and a musician. I'm glad to let them stay for free in my house because they are driven and creative. They have something new to show me all the time. They cannot become employed because of traumatic event after traumatic event, many of which I've been there to witness. My choice is to either tell them to go get fucked and get 2 McJobs and waste their time flipping burgers 60 hours per week because "I've got mine" or to give them some space to create.

UBI trials have shown that by and large people don't just sit at home idle getting high all day. People have an innate need to feel useful. Perhaps the UBI trials I've read were flawed because they didn't include the wage depression (per hour) and elimination of the minimum wage I'm predicting. I also worry that the actors in those trials weren't entirely model actors since they had to know that such a thing could not possibly last in the political climate.

Mostly, I think the UBI will give us a way forward to fearlessly improve automation. A few robot technicians

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not corrupt, they just have a really, really, REALLY bad hoarding problem.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

Plenty of evidence, where? How would it be fucked up? 50 years down the line, healthcare will be largely managed by the successive generations of da Vinci robots, and likely autonomous for the most part at that point.

Further, it's fucked up now and how will insurance companies, which are clearly more expensive on the whole, solve it? Huh?

As for social security, if politicians wouldn't raid it for pet projects, and if we required everyone to pay into social security at every income bracket, it would be the most successful program in history. Some "entitlement" if you've earned the damn thing.

As for dependency... you mean like being able to trust that it'll be there if you need it? Seriously, people like you like to sound smart, but really you're just shoveling shit rather than facing reality.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

I also couldn't help but notice that you proved my point. Your perspective isn't, "We need to change the untouchable mindset and put everything in some level of flux; some things over decades and others over shorter time-frames." Your perspective is, "No, no, no! It won't work." And you immediately brought out one you hate.

If we had something like single payer implemented - and it's something polls show most Americans want to try - and it didn't work down the line, it should be something that could be changed into something else.

Don't you see, it's the inability for folks like you to accept the occasional failure - and those who have vested interest in keeping things as they are, but they could be overcome without you - that keeps us from ever hoping to change anything, and not the entitlement types you speak of.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

Homogeneity helps, definitely, but it doesn't explain the whole and I don't believe a large population size is at fault. We like to say that in order to not admit fault because we happen to have a seemingly large population, but beyond a certain point as populations grow the number of viewpoints really does not.

On population density, which I’d argue is a fairer measure than overall population for the sake of comparison to other countries, we’re between Liberia and Zimbabwe at 85 per square mile. Not exactly countries known to work. The resulting distance between groups is enough to divide them from other groups, and the population of those groups large enough to do harm. Compare this to Japan at 873 or the United Kingdom at 660. Less gaps.

So if one is going to make an argument over size and how well government functions as a result, a fairer analysis and argument may be that our population density and thereby our population is too small to expect a nimble government. My gut reaction would be to disagree, but I could be wrong to do so and at least you’d have some data backing your point then. It may be counter-intuitive, but it's a thought that will keep me up tonight.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

Open borders is not the problem. Having a requirement that the person crossing the border can finance his/her stay is..

I'm all for the free movement of people.. If someone have a job-offer somewhere let them move to that place and work... After working for a number of years, and paid their taxes, they could be allowed to apply for a citizenship..

And there are many levels in terms of open borders. One or more of these items could be done and still classify it as a open border.
- Simple ID check.
- Simple ID check, if not from region require passport.
- Simple ID check. Check for warrants and/or track peoples movement within the region when crossing borders.
- Simple ID check, if not from region require passport. Check for warrants and/or track peoples movement within the region when crossing borders.
- Not allow free transfer of goods but free movement of people.
- Require proof of being able to finance his/her stay. (proof of job offer or having money)
- Social services only available to citizens or tax-payers in the country.
- Require a simple background check before allowing a person to stay (work/live/study) in a country...

But the thing is... Just because you limit the free movement of people within a region you don't get rid of terrible things like what has happen in France or Belgium. There is always bad people that is really hard to get rid of, and there are many unofficial ways to get into a country.. Just look at how many people that manage to get from Mexico to the US each year..

I think the new rules that was introduced in the US about if you have *ever* visited Sudan, Irak and a few others you need to apply for a VISA is just ridiculous.. Have not been to those countries myself but i cannot see how that would improve security.. The embassies will get a ton more work to screen people allowing for less time to screen each person.. Having a rule stating if you have visited these countries in the last 2 years of if you where born in one of these countries and visited it within the last 10 years we require a VISA would be more sane..

But hey... you have the chance of getting Trump as president with the possibility to ban all Muslims from visiting your country so who's to argue that you have a sane country..

I would not mind a requirement tracking people that moves cross borders.. Do not even mind putting some restrictions of what's required of you if you go to a different country (like a requirement that you will need a job there to be allowed to move).. What i do mind is the crazy thing where it's either black or white in peoples eyes where it's taken to the extreme and ignoring what's good from each side..

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

Define what is a refugee.
1. Person living in a poor country wanting a better life.
2. Person living in a country where he/she may be forced into military service.
3. Person living in a country where he might be prosecuted because of who he is.
4. Person living in a country where he might be prosecuted because of who he is. With the risk of getting a death-sentence.
5. Person living in a country where there is war. (or fighting)
6. Person living in a country where there is war in some areas but not in the region they are living in.

I would say 3-5 should be classified as refugees. And those i have no problem with..

I would also like to see a shared responsibility where there would be a requirement in the EU where you would have to apply for refugee status in the first country you enter into within the EU. All refugees should then be spread out over the whole area according to what each country can manage.. Pool together money from all countries within the EU and spread out the refugees over the whole EU instead.

"Fun" fact: Poland stated that they cannot accept any more refugees.. (They have stated that all guest-workers from Ukraine are seen as refugees)

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

Good, I'm on five already! Woot!!

Re:Don't conflate those things

[MitchDev]

But if you have true absolute power, you are GOD, YOU decide what is morally right and wrong, there is none to gainsay you, hence you cannot be corrupted.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because nearly-open borders have worked out so well recently in Belgium and France and other places in the EU.

From wiki, 2 of the 3 assailants in Belgium were Belgians. Born there, in fact.

Likewise, of the 9 attackers in the Paris, 5 were French and 2 were Belgians.

How would closed borders have help?

Re:Don't conflate those things

[buck-yar]

"My health or my parent's health should not come down ensuring someone makes a profit for a hospital stay"

You could say a similar statement about a roof over your head, or food on your table.

But as my father is a food producer, should he have to provide service to you for free? He's self employed so everything he makes as profit goes to putting food on the kitchen table (we were not rich growing up).

Re:Don't conflate those things

[arglebargle_xiv]

We were able to effectively end childhood hunger in the 70s,

... by redefining it to food-insecure. Not necessarily the best example.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[david_thornley]

The Republicans are the ones propagandizing that government doesn't work, and some of them are willing to do pretty much anything to prove it. Democrats are more trusting of government.

I see that AC has not looked over Bernie's campaign site. In the Issues section, there's details on exactly how all of Bernie's changes would be paid for. It's reasonable to argue about this (and how good the changes would be, for that matter), but we need to give Bernie credit for making such an argument possible.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[david_thornley]

Sure, you could say the same about food and shelter. The big differences are that they are usually predictable expenses. I know pretty much what my mortgage payment will be five years from now, so I can budget it. Medical costs are unpredictable. I can go years without incurring serious expenses, and then suddenly have to have treatment costing tens of thousands of dollars. (Been there, done that.)

I assume your father would be happy to provide service in return for payment, and the UBI would give more people the ability to pay. The UBI would probably have increased your family income (it would probably decrease mine, but we've got plenty). Nobody's talking about requiring the provision of service for free, except for people who completely misunderstand for whatever reason.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[david_thornley]

Sure it's ethics, which means that every individual will have to decide for themself. We have laws and a system to apply them, so an individual can't decide that something should be legal or illegal.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[micahraleigh]

Ethics is based on "Am I treating someone the way I want to be treated?".

They can decide on that.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[tnk1]

Don't you see, it's the inability for folks like you to accept the occasional failure - and those who have vested interest in keeping things as they are, but they could be overcome without you - that keeps us from ever hoping to change anything, and not the entitlement types you speak of.

No, the problem is that people like you only see one solution to a problem. It's the State or nothing. Nothing else works but the State, or the evil insurance companies may destroy us.

I don't mind change, when I feel like someone has actually thought it through. I just see people who think that voting for higher taxes is equivalent to charity, and that government programs are the only possible or desirable solution for badly managed health care. "Change" and "progress" doesn't mean "the government does it for me," because it is clear that the government can suck at it as much as anyone else.

And if you don't like the example of Social Security, let's look at actual government-run health care: the VA Hospitals. The government can't even operate a health care system with even a subset of the population successfully.

Bear in mind, I don't think it is impossible for you to bring in someone to run a government health care system properly. At least for certain periods of time. What I am concerned about is that this system will not be able to be overturned when it goes bad because it becomes a political football. Honestly, I think we'd probably do better with our health care system if we let the programs and organizations fail once in awhile, but our health care system is based on doing everything we can to prop up whatever we have so politicians can pretend to "do something" when even they know things are fucked.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[wyHunter]

Oh yeah, I forgot.

Re:Don't conflate those things

[Anonymous Coward]

And small government is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE easier to change that a large centralized government. Also you're ridiculous with your innuendo that small governments are more corrupt than larger centralized governments. If you want to outright make that claim then provide your references, it is rather clear that you are completely unable to support such a claim, hence your usage of innuendo to drive to make a point is wholly unsupported by the data.

Did you hear about that in your country ?

[BESTouff]

I heard the very same news on the radio today; except it was in France and was about French intel service. Either it's a coincidence, or it's yet another press release begging for more power for intel services, around the world.

Re:Did you hear about that in your country ?

[Aighearach]

They can't exactly delete it before they get in trouble for having it unless they get the others who have it to delete it also. ;) Just my one conspiracy angle on this.

Re:Did you hear about that in your country ?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The powers" are talking in EU about the need for a unified spy agency for the EU. This is the birth of the modern NKVD equivalent.

Total B.S.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is total B.S. With that facility in Utah and who knows where else... there is an info orgy and they are loving it.

Re:Total B.S.

[GuB-42]

This is total B.S. With that facility in Utah and who knows where else... there is an info orgy and they are loving it.

Trouble is, they made an orgy and expect to get married.

Re:Total B.S.

[mjm1231]

This is total B.S. With that facility in Utah and who knows where else... there is an info orgy and they are loving it.

Trouble is, they made an orgy and expect to get married.

Not a problem, they're in Utah.

William Binney? That was 15 year ago

[Trachman]

Unless you are living in the cave, you should have noticed never ending AI advertisment from IBM: Hi, my name is Watson!

Reality, is that it does not take Binney to say that having too much information is counterproductive. Thus be assured, that military versions of AI, are continuously are poring and monitoring through the dossier files, currently maintained as relationship databases.

You can be assured that there is an automated never-ending surveilance and the code, the AI, the algorithms will get better over the time.

Human life is so digitized, that pretty much everything can be used to infer necessary conclusions.

Get this: information gathering organizations NEVER delete anything.

Re:William Binney? That was 15 year ago

[MightyMartian]

Not even AIs are going to be able to overcome the nature of false positives. Even if you get them to the same discriminatory level a human filter can have, and presuming they're operating at millions of times the speed of any human filter, you still have to deal with the fact that the intrinsic nature of the data itself makes false positives inevitable.

Re:William Binney? That was 15 year ago

[Aighearach]

Newsflash, you don't have to live in a cave to not watch TV advertising. Wow, talk about "living in a cave." You think everybody does things the same as you!

5% of American households don't even have a TV; up from 1% 10 years ago. Of those who have a TV, many only watch public television, or only watch during 1 sport season.

Many more use time-shifting devices that automatically skip ads.

I've certainly never seen the ad. And I don't live in a cave; only rich people can afford properties with caves. Good luck finding a cave to live in for less than seven figures.

Re:William Binney? That was 15 year ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool, so you never go to a bar, restaurant, airport, or any number of other public venues that have TVs showing ads.

Advertising is so pervasive in society many people don't even realize they are watching it.

Big Brother is Acting

[cloud.pt]

If an analyst is overwhelmed with data by querying any single person's name, I imagine it won't be difficult to charge anybody with anything at all just because "DATA". Talk about abuse of power and authoritarian regimes - pick a person, pick a crime, pick circumstantial evidence from the big bad pool of "content", as Snowden puts it, and there you have it: reasonable suspicion à la carte.

10 years as a civilian?

[xanthines-R-yummy]

How does he know that the NSA hasn't hired more informaticists in the past 10 years? If I read TFA correctly, he's been out for over a decade. I kind of doubt he's privy to top secret (or higher) information like that, although civilians are granted security clearances too sometimes.

I'm not saying he's wrong, I'm just not clear on HOW he knows what he's saying is accurate. Just so you know, I'm not fan of Patriot Act or the NSA's "hoovering" of data, meta or otherwise.

Re:10 years as a civilian?

[Anonymous Coward]

The NSA isn't strictly military. Much of their staff is civilian.

Re:10 years as a civilian?

[OpinOnion]

If the programs worked, we'd be thwarting terror plots more than getting hit by them.. yet that is not what is happening. The NSA does not really have access to the level of info they'd really need and they don't have the coding or AI to pull of quantifying the data they do have. Since the NSA has failed for over a decade now to make these programs do anything useful it's pretty safe to say they don't know how to use the data or they aren't getting the right data. You don't need to be an insider to know that. .and as you say.. claiming to know that as an insider really means nothing anyway. For that matter we should not take Snowden's claims entirely seriously because he didn't have the clearance to all the data he would need to understand the programs he has supposedly exposed. He only has pieces of data and almost none of it was real world data... such as proof of damaging illegal use of the NSA program. Snowden primarly exposed potential for abuse, not much actual abuse, and that matters a great deal as far as getting people to really care about the NSA programs. Half of so of Americans simply don't care enough to fight the program and perhaps it makes them feel safer. That's a big problem when it comes to reform. Pretty obvious in any case as you horde info like that you wind up with 99% of that info be 100% worthless.

Re:10 years as a civilian?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because he's familiar with the size of the ocean, and the available sifting mechanisms.

If you collect a massive ocean worth of data every, and hire people and give them big machines to sift through it, you can still be assured that you can't drain the ocean no matter how many people you can possibly hire, or how big the machine is.

Also, consider that the amount of data to sift through is INCREASING every year.

Re:10 years as a civilian?

[phantomfive]

to be fair, the NSA has never been particularly effective at stopping terrorist attacks, so the conclusion is hardly surprising.....

Re:10 years as a civilian?

[Frosty Piss]

If the programs worked, we'd be thwarting terror plots more than getting hit by them.. yet that is not what is happening.

How do you know? The FBI arrests plotters and ISIL recruits all the time. And simply because they have not publically disclosed "big plots" that they have broken up doesn't mean that such things haven't happened.

Re:10 years as a civilian?

[entropy01]

He was in for 30 years prior. I'm sure he made some friends and still has contact with a few of them on the inside. They want to get the message out, they tell him, he tells us.

Re:10 years as a civilian?

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you know? The FBI arrests plotters and ISIL recruits all the time.

Mostly plotters and ISIS recruits of the FBI's own making. They find a guy who's a bit mentally unstable, befriend him, then harass him for months on end encouraging him to do something illegal. When they finally push him over the edge and he agrees, they supply him with fake bomb parts or some similar nonsense, then bust him and parade him all over the media as some kind of major FBI success story. Gotta justify the budget.

Re:10 years as a civilian?

[tinkerton]

It's not a secret the NSA has been hiring more informaticists. He's saying you're not going to fix this with more informaticists, and while he's on the outside the little data he's got since (including from unofficial contacts of which there are a lot) confirms his opinion and his warnings. The article is a year old but his opinion hasn't changed the last 15 years. Data gathering should be targeted, not trying to do a wide sweep.Targeted spying is much more effective, it's more legal and it's more moral. The general datamining approach is powerful from a forensic point of view but its predictive power is minimal. If you look at the Boston bombing you don't need inside info to deduce this. I think he's talking a lot of sense , while the assumption that the NSA secretly is much better than that is a pretty weak one. Also the claim that he doesn't know what he's talking about because he's out of the loop has been peddled since the start. It's bullshit. That the people on the inside are out of the loop, that I can see. They're too busy datacrunching to see the big picture. A guy from inside the NSA can hardly talk shop with Snowden, but Binney can.

The CIA has similar problems btw. The complaint that you need more feet on the ground instead of hightech has been around for a long time now.

Re:10 years as a civilian?

[F.Ultra]

So publicity is only for the small plots and not the big ones? Why?

Re:10 years as a civilian?

[dbIII]

Since for the purpose of press exposure they've disclosed big plots that were actually sting operations fishing for the gullible I suspect we would have heard a lot each time they found something real.

Re:10 years as a civilian?

[Anonymous Coward]

So publicity is only for the small plots and not the big ones? Why?

Because big plots are scary to the average joe regardless of whether they succeed or not. People in the US would freak out for years if they got even just the rumor that the NSA/FBI/CIA/TLA had prevented another plane based attack on the US. However, tell them that some random nutjob was wanting to blow up some random government building then people are just like "meh, stupid terrorists".

Pretty much everyone in the trade knew that

[Schmorgluck]

Seriously, it's nice that the NSA comes out as overwhelmed with data it can't exploit (although, as some have already pointed out, that's not particularly new - see 9/11 for an example too obvious to pass), but every internal security agency in the West has been saying so for years (or rather, members of said organizations complained about it anonymously or through their unions). Intelligence requires data, but mass collection of data is of dubious help when the people in charge of examining it is already understaffed for exploiting classically collected data.

Re:Pretty much everyone in the trade knew that

[Whorhay]

9/11 was not an example of not being able to spot valuable information hidden among mountains of chaff. The CIA was actively investigating some of the conspirators prior to 9/11. The CIA managers in charge of that investigation weren't interested in sharing any of the glory from busting the conspirators and so when they entered the USA didn't inform the FBI. The CIA wasn't aware what the plan was but hoped that they'd be leaving the USA again soon so they could continue investigating them and eventually bust them for something worth a promotion. There was actually an FBI agent on loan or something to the CIA team who wanted to inform his agency of the conspirators US entry but he was threatened with having his career ruined. PBS's Frontline did a very good episode about the whole thing years and years ago that should be available for free on their site.

Homeland Security is supposed to be the solution to this kind of crap by making one agency that can readily handle investigations that cross into other agencies domains. A cheaper and simpler solution would probably have been to separate some heads from bodies, metaphorically speaking, and strengthening policy and punishments around not informing other agencies when something crosses domains.

Re:Pretty much everyone in the trade knew that

[Ormy]

...And the whole thing was eerily predicted in the 1998 film 'siege'.

Re:Pretty much everyone in the trade knew that

[Schmorgluck]

My point was that the CIA had pointers (including some provided by allies), while the NSA was in the dark. I won't comment of what you say about what they did with said informations. It doesn't match what I remember reading on the subject, but I'm not very sure of my sources.

Re:Pretty much everyone in the trade knew that

[Citizen of Earth]

They should give Harold Finch a call.

ineffective

[Anonymous Coward]

Just depends on how you define "effective". They are effective at collecting data and undermining The Constitution. Ineffective at just about everything else.

Google Can Handle It

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't dump that data, sell it!

Google could put it to good use and maybe keep Youtube free.

Why say that?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't imagine most of us are fans of the Patriot Act. So why include a disclaimer at the end? I must admit it's been awhile since my last visit, has /. become so zealous that such things are now necessary?

It would be profoundly sad if in an espoused love of freedom if /. now suppresses any speech that could hint of a dissenting opinion.

Re:Why say that?

[xanthines-R-yummy]

Just didn't want anyone to think I was some government counteragent!

We already know this

[OpinOnion]

It's common knowledge if you bother to read.. these reports have been coming down the line for years and it's fully predictable that would happen. The main use of all this data always was a timemachine of sorta, not effective real time keyword based spying. The fact is we don't have programmers good enough to pull that off yet. It takes billions just to get a car to drive itself within fairly obvious present rules. The idea that you'd intelligently understand human behavior via relatively simple algorithms should be an obvious fail using today's technology. It's not that it's can't be done, it's just that nobody can do it yet and the NSA is not particularly ahead of the curve on much of anything other than secret warrants. NSA exploits have almost all come from the wild and we've seen that they have near zero capcity to stop even the simplest terror plots, often run almost entirely in the open including posts on facebook. If the NSA's programs don't stop a terrorist scheme as simple and out in the open as the Boston Bombers, we know they aren't effective. Almost none of these attacks have used any sophisticated technology and the NSA has stopped almost no attacks. We know they cannot effectively parse that data, because if they could we would see the result as a reduction of plainly obvious militants operating domestically with no problem.. even while real people around them question or report them. So.. even with leads from real people the NSA and FBI generally cannot manage to arrest terrorists in the act or any significant crime.

Data Hoarders

[Beerdood]

Maybe the NSA could be convinced to do a special TV show appearance on Hoarders. Have some other agencies come together in an intervention to help 'em let go.

DOJ: So NSA... we've got some recorded phone calls here from August 3rd, 2003 between a Darlene [redacted] and her grandson [redacted]
NSA: Yes.. she's born in 1948, lives in Arlington, TX and her SSN is [redacted]. I remember when we first collected those calls.
DOJ: Well then, we listened to this a few times, and it sounds like some fairly innocuous conversation. Nothing criminal whatsoever.
NSA: Right
DHS: So... do you think we can delete these calls then? I mean, there's no..
NSA: NOOOOOO!! There could still be connections to terrorism in those calls... somehow! You never know what we might find on meta-data analysis
DEA: Look... we've identified all the phone references with mentions of drugs, and made copies of those for investigations. We never use the rest of those recordings, and I'm the only one here that really uses those at all. Maybe we could just.. y'know.. delete...
NSA: Don't touch that data! It's mine! I own it!

Re:Shhhh! Everyone stop typing so much!

[Aighearach]

If they figured out that being "liberal" or supporting Free Software is just political speech that they should ignore, that would help them pare it down a little. :)

Tracking the Linux Journal readers alone probably costs them a lot of storage and search noise.

Wow...

[MitchDev]

The government propaganda machine is in overdrive trying to fool the citizens...

Fish school

[Dorianny]

Big data is great when doing statistical analysis not so great for spear fishing

Re:Fish school

[Anonymous Coward]

Big data is great for a number of things. But big *noise* makes pretty much all of those things worthless.

B.S.

[Anonymous Coward]

Does a query care how much data is in the database? Does a hadoop job care how many words there when it does a word count? This is BS.

WTF - it's easy

[Anonymous Coward]

Just filter out all the cat videos.

Sheeesh.

This may be in part by design...

[Anonymous Coward]

If they have all this data on everyone, then if someone comes to TPTB's attention by the old-fashioned way ("anonymous" report, being the ex of the wrong person, voicing politically incorrect opinions), then there's guaranteed to be some grounds for punishment somewhere in the haystack.

ha, I don't even feel bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hang on, I've got to go make 3 more gmail accounts and set them up to forward encrypted junkmail in a circle.

Burner phones !!!

[Tungbo]

I've said this several years ago,  All this metadata collection is easily defeated when the culprits uses burner phone or sim cards.  That is exactly what they did in Brussels.   Just because one has a lot of data doesn't mean you can make sense of them.  Think of the Internet Search Engines before Google.  You get TONS of useless hits.  Google's result were better due to massive amount of other people's usage pattern.  Here the terror acts are so few, that they offer little to help train any software.  It is a very difficult problem that may not be solvable by Big Data.

Re:Burner phones !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Burner phones once monitored can ID you based on the people you call, duration of the call, and some other things. If you change phones you either keep the phone number somehow (now that's you digital ID), or you have to communicate the new information via the old one (and therefore link the devices directly), or use another communications method, which can be used to ID you.

It take more planning to be anonymous than just using said burner. Just like you can have a very secure computer only to find your spouse blabbing about you on Facebook while playing Chinese Flash versions of Angry Birds because it's free that way...

Re: Burner phones !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Metadata analysis might catch the stupid actors - those with half a brain are using burner phones, dead drops and other tradecraft. This shit isn't unknown or rocket science.

Re:Burner phones !!!

[omnichad]

All it takes is doing a few other logged activities at the same time you're carrying the powered-on burner phone and it's linked to you. That could be using any non-cash form of payment, driving home every day, or going to work/school.

Re:Burner phones !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've said this several years ago, All this metadata collection is easily defeated when the culprits uses burner phone or sim cards. That is exactly what they did in Brussels. Just because one has a lot of data doesn't mean you can make sense of them. Think of the Internet Search Engines before Google. You get TONS of useless hits. Google's result were better due to massive amount of other people's usage pattern. Here the terror acts are so few, that they offer little to help train any software. It is a very difficult problem that may not be solvable by Big Data.

The San Bernardino folks didn't use burners, did they?

Also, call data can't be the only thing collected en masse.

Re:Burner phones !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

But the new prepaid phone comes with a new number. I can get a new phone (with prepaid sim) with a number for about 20 euros and no need for ID (papers please).
Or I can buy a new "dumb phone" and a prepaid sim separately.

Re:Burner phones !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Think of the Internet Search Engines before Google. You get TONS of useless hits.

More to the point: I get tons of useless hits from Google.

Granted, it's because it's 2016 and there's several metric fucktons more useless content than there was back in 1998. But that just adds to the point. The more shit you shovel, the more shit you have to sort, until it becomes a virtually impossible task and you're covered in shit.

Re:Burner phones !!!

[david_thornley]

Burner phones once monitored

I think you're not quite up on the concept of a "burner phone".

Re:Burner phones !!!

[radarskiy]

"or you have to communicate the new information"

You load the new numbers into the address book on the new sim card that you already have to put in the the new phones that you already have to hand out on a regular basis. The end users only need to know which contact name to use for which purpose.

I can hardly believe

[Anonymous Coward]

If he is talking about human looking at massive amount of data then I may agree with him. These day it's most likely done by machine, so it mean they just haven't came up with an intelligent and efficient software to find them.

Worst case just write a program to trim the data down to what they would have gotten the other way.

Re:I can hardly believe

[AHuxley]

The NSA and GCHQ are collecting all in the hope to replay any event and then find connecting digital hops 3 or 4 hops away from a well understood origin.
Every call, funding, fax, digital account, chat room, file, propaganda support, contact and context.
The problem with the NSA and GCHQ thinking on this is bulk collection just gets too much random data after event data thats junk.
The other problem is acting on such collected information is letting the world know of such methods. Use the gathered results too many times to WIN in public and the world takes note as the information only had one origin - a computer, digital or voice print phone network.
Tradecraft has well understood and evolved around the US and UK total fascination with voice calls, phone numbers, banking, phone, computer and networking since the 1960's.
The huge tasking budgets that got sold to the political oversight meetings was the ability to listen to any senior Soviet official using an early cell phone in 1980's Moscow. That easy collection win was was projected into the 2010's and way beyond with ever growing teams of private sector consultants and gov workers.
Everyone of interest would always carry a cell phone as a beacon, home computer with a consumer OS, use consumer VOIP, move digital files just as past generations had a phone, a fax, voice print, modem. Make lots of calls to other known or new phone numbers as generations of people always had....
If digital collection is all a government has, the world will always be sold as been digital collection ready. Collect it all was the policy and way to ever more funding and gov and mil expansion. Contractors enjoyed up selling new methods and systems too with great over time.
Now real world complexity sets in. How to track people with no cell phones?
Ireland in the 1960-90's showed the UK just how to do that with expert teams, undercover vans, cars, trucks, sat, local clothing, haircuts suited to the area and the ability to blend in for days, weeks, months, years to track just one person.
Thats the new skill sets needed, 6-10 people with skills trying to cover one person again. Gov teams have to blend into now very different inner city communities and have the ability to present a good reason for been in that insular area of a city everyday when openly confronted by a closed inner city community.
Intelligent and efficient software is useless if the interesting people dont feel the need to make calls everyday or interact with expected digital networks under constant watch...
Time to fund the mil and gov reconnaissance teams at the rate of 6 to 10 skilled team members per interesting person again. Thats some great new overtime for 24/7 eyes on work with a few million ++ people of interest.
The other method is to turn every interesting person who has every had any contact with the legal system into the perfect informant. They have the life story, slang, backgrounds, homes, work places to collect it all :) Stories for cash, stories to stay free, stories to impress their gov contact. Get to every boss or company and try and have them collect information on all of their workers? The ratios of people needing constant watch is getting interesting.

I've always tought about this

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF they do with all that information? They must be drowning themselves.

So they're not just evil

[Anonymous Coward]

They're now also a useless waste of money.

Security in exchange for liberty at its best!

To Paraphrase Frank Zappa

[sehlat]

Data is not information.
Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.

Re:Shhhh! Everyone stop typing so much!

[Jason Levine]

I've been trying to be considerate to the NSA by just posting jibber and leaving out the jabber. Won't someone think of the NSA?

There's a Difference

[SwashbucklingCowboy]

between data and information.

Solution

[originalGMC]

They should add a research and development branch to create a new interface - merge data with consciousness, to speed up analyst intelligence gathering. Alternatively, they could open a pirate bay mirror and host all the data over bittorrent.

Inundated with so much data they can't process it

[DidgetMaster]

Now if we can just do that to all the scammers out there. Give them all so much bogus information that it takes them too much time/resources to figure out what is legit that they could use to scam someone.

Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Coming up.. Hoarders the NSA edition.

Re:Shhhh! Everyone stop typing so much!

[Anonymous Coward]

Your comment was the Bomb. Jihad is bad. I love looking at planes take off from Air Force Base.

Free The Data! Let the World See Itself For Once!

[littlewink]

This data should be released to the world for all to see along with search tools to suit.

Sociologists and citizens alike could plumb the depths of human behavior for years and finally, for once, get a clear view of political, economical and social alliances in all their (formerly) clandestine glory. Some changes might even result.

It's for later...

[maharvey]

It doesn't matter now. They'll store it until they have the capability and need to mine it properly. Data never really goes away, it will all come back to bite us later.... and if they do dump something, it's because its worthless and they probably have something juicier to replace it with. Then again, I'd be surprised if there isn't a backup somewhere. These things have a way of popping back up, long after you had forgotten about it.

It also wouldn't surprise me if this is disinformation designed to put everyone at ease. "Don't worry, the government is too incompetent to do anything with the data. So it doesn't matter if they collect it."

Never attribute to incompetence what can be explained by malice. We are told to believe the opposite, and it strokes the ego to point and laugh, but it may be foolish to do so. Be skeptical, assume the worst, and hope to be pleasantly surprised.

That's what happens

[Anonymous Coward]

when NPC's think they're God.

Exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

...

Ruh oh

[Anonymous Coward]

They have no intelligence!!!

The baby and the bathwater

[Anonymous Coward]

Your conclusion is a little hasty.
The "government" is not a mortal enemy - the government can be managed by changing laws and priorities. The government can be your friend.

Currently though, many governments have been co-opted by various lobby groups and criminals, and they generally serve the status quo, increasing power for politicians and LEO, and fucking over the citizens.

Don't be mistaken - "good government" is the only solution to "bad government", and it's up to YOU and ME to make this work. Sadly, we're usually too self-involved, selfish, ignorant or lazy to do so, so the greedy bastards get to win instead of the populace.

The idea that "less government" or "no government" is the solution to "bad government" is ludicrous.

While we're at it

[vandamme]

Can we just delete the Internet and start over? It's just full of useless crap.

We all saw this coming...

[Anonymous Coward]

This was the main concern during the construction of the Utah data center:

If you are building a giant farmhouse to hold all the haystacks because you aren't able to quickly find the needle, then you will continuously have to expand the warehouse.

Taxpayer money would have been better spent enhancing the search/filter techniques to allow for more efficient mining and analysis. Instead, we once again settled for the old expression "good enough for government work".

Wanted

[martinfb]

IT data mining job opportunities. Established organization. Great pay and benefits. Must be willing and able to keep a secret.

Arrived?!

[martinfb]

Did the NSA make it to the end of the internet?

Big hay stack

[MoarSauce123]

The NSA is looking for needles and all they did is employ warrantless wiretapping to increase the size of the hay stack making their own work more difficult. I have the impression that the NSA and many other three letter agencies run these useless programs solely for the sake of running the programs. It is a self-fulfilling activity solely for the reason of asking Congress for more power and more money, essentially wrestling away any control Congress should have. There is a fix for that: cut the budgets for the NSA, FBI, CIA and all the other dozens of security agencies in half. They refuse to cooperate due to turf fights and personal power trips of their top brass. Cutting funding drastically will force them to focus on those programs that produce results and sunset all the other waste. Would also be nice to charge back Bush/Cheney for their insane waste of tax payer money, they have enough dough put aside, but I doubt anyone dares to hold anyone in the administration or Congress personally responsible for utterly ruining the USA solely for personal gain.