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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.
You insensitive clods! The NSA is having trouble keeping up with all your jibber-jabber!
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!
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
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.