Well, Dave, here's a couple of relevant personal thoughts regarding vacuum-cleaner-like data gathering... 1) there's a saying I heard recently that the NSA's approach to intelligence is like trying to find a needle in the haystack by sending tractors in the field to gather more hay. Based on my understanding of the reliability of inference-making I suspect the problem is that and worse. So these so-called vacuum-cleaner technologies probably won't improve the ability to predict terrorism that much, but the elimination of checks and balances will almost certainly result in lots of "false positives" that can be used as presumptive reasons to harass both US citizens and foreigners for "inferences" that are little more than wild-ass intuitions about what kind of activity might be correlated with bad actors. Of course there are lots of technology companies who sell stuff to the intelligence community who are full of hyperbolic claims about the wonders of mass data collection and analysis, but if they were so good, why don't they predict the stock market instead and make money the old fashioned way? Predicting the stock market is a trivial problem compared to predicting and preventing terrorism, but in the market there is actually a measure of success, whereas the measure of success in the beltway intelligence technology business is getting another, bigger contract. (that's what comes from outsourcing to a military-industrial complex that is so big it can buy members of Congress, lock stock and barrel, as we saw with Duke Cunningham). 2) what the NSA does outside the US may be legal under US law, but by no means is it either legal or a source of pride when viewed in other countries or in international law. The grand glorious endeavor of spying is fundamentally anti-social and anti-humanity. Apparently, part of the standard CIA induction briefing is being reminded that humint is just another word for fraud, deception, burglary, and other things that we do not tolerate in civilized societies. If agents carrying out such acts are discovered in our country they can be executed, and by symmetry most countries can and will execute our spies if caught. (this may be cruel and unusual, because theft of information inside a country is usually punished by more lenient methods). Sigint (though the hands *seem* cleaner) is legally and morally just wire fraud and peeping-tomism etc. by another name, and again, agents who listen in on radio or wire conversations in other countries are violating their laws, just as agents doing that in the US would be guilty of espionage and subject to execution or harsh penalties. So by any "golden rule" standard of justice we should be careful. One can argue that, just as war is sometimes thought to be necessary to deal with threats to the citizens of our nation, intelligence gathering, however illegal, might also be sometimes necessary. But it's not a "good" at any level, and hardly something we should be proud of. However, the thrill of hanging out with the codebreakers shouldn't be used to glamorize what is, at its core, just a government-sanctioned form of antisocial behavior. It's practitioners cannot be trusted to decide what is appropriate, because they are by definition able to carry out acts that are antisocial and illegal. ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as eugen@leitl.org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/ ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]