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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.
"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?"
This is named infoxication and is known for decades.
Sounds to me like their search and filtering capabilities are the problem, not the amount of data available.
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?
... 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
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!
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?
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.
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.
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....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
He wanted plenty of spies! They were far cheaper than tons of warriors and all their food supplies and equipment.
You insensitive clods! The NSA is having trouble keeping up with all your jibber-jabber!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's nothing like $HOME
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!
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
The government propaganda machine is in overdrive trying to fool the citizens...
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.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
either that or Chicago
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Big data is great when doing statistical analysis not so great for spear fishing
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.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
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.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
" 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...
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.
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.
Data is not information.
Information is not knowledge.
Knowledge is not wisdom.
Like a trip to hell, one-way! Or Detroit!
Which reminds me
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Just didn't want anyone to think I was some government counteragent!
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?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
> 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.
between data and information.
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.
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.
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.
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
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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.
Coming up.. Hoarders the NSA edition.
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.
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. :) 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.
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
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Welcome to Slashdot. Two drink minimum.
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."
Absolute power hasn't failed! It's never been tried!
Speak for yourself.
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.
"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).
We were able to effectively end childhood hunger in the 70s,
... by redefining it to food-insecure. Not necessarily the best example.
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.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Can we just delete the Internet and start over? It's just full of useless crap.
Ethics is based on "Am I treating someone the way I want to be treated?".
They can decide on that.
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.
IT data mining job opportunities. Established organization. Great pay and benefits. Must be willing and able to keep a secret.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Did the NSA make it to the end of the internet?
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Oh yeah, I forgot.
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.