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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?"
Sounds to me like their search and filtering capabilities are the problem, not the amount of data available.
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.
You insensitive clods! The NSA is having trouble keeping up with all your jibber-jabber!
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!
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
either that or Chicago
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.