Spies LEVITATE infohounds, filesharers, and Glee watchers

rysiek rysiek at hackerspace.pl
Sat Jan 31 06:11:58 PST 2015


Dnia piątek, 30 stycznia 2015 18:39:14 grarpamp pisze:
> http://www.cbc.ca/news/cse-tracks-millions-of-downloads-daily-snowden-docume
> nts-1.2930120
> https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/28/canada-cse-levitation-mass-su
> rveillance/
> 
> So what do you do if you're a vast global adversary network of old
> chums, with unlimited resources, a world citizenry that is perhaps
> becoming unafraid of terrists as background noise, and some might
> say an authority to keep?
> 
> Why, sit back and spy on everyday knowledge seekers, file sharers
> and you tubers of course!

Wasn't that the main idea all the time? Cf.:

1. http://www.stratfor.com/obstacles_capture_osama_bin_laden
tl;dr NSA-style spying doesn't really help that much in "anti-terrorism"

2. http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/05/24/why-does-the-nsa-engage-in-mass-surveillance-of-americans-when-it-s-statistically-impossible-for-such-spying-to-detect-terrorists/
tl;dr it is statistically impossible to have profiling (based, say, on dragnet 
surveillance) work well on large populations -- too many false positives and 
false negatives.

1. & 2. can be safely assumed to be known for the NSA and powers that are. So 
obviously anti-terrorism is not the real aim of all this. What is?

Shall we quote 2.?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Suppose that NSA’s system is really, really, really good, really,
really good, with an accuracy rate of .90, and a misidentification
rate of .00001, which means that only 3,000 innocent people are
misidentified as terrorists. With these suppositions, then the
probability that people are terrorists given that NSA’s system of
surveillance identifies them as terrorists is only p=0.2308, which is
far from one and well below flipping a coin. NSA’s domestic monitoring
of everyone’s email and phone calls is useless for finding terrorists.

NSA knows this. Bayes’ Theorem is elementary common knowledge.

Also, mass surveillance of the entire population is logically
plausible if NSA’s domestic spying is not looking for terrorists, but
looking for something else, something that is not so rare as
terrorists. For example, the May 19 Fox News opinion poll of 900
registered voters found that 30% dislike the Bush administration so
much they want him impeached. If NSA were monitoring email and phone
calls to identify pro-impeachment people, and if the accuracy rate
were .90 and the error rate were .01, then the probability that people
are pro-impeachment given that NSA surveillance system identified them
as such, would be p=.98, which is coming close to certainty (p_1.00).

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

> Everything cypherpunks were saying in 1984 is coming true.
> The story continues...

-- 
Pozdrawiam,
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak

Zmieniam klucz GPG :: http://rys.io/pl/147
GPG Key Transition :: http://rys.io/en/147
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 931 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <https://lists.cpunks.org/pipermail/cypherpunks/attachments/20150131/a4a0f082/attachment-0002.sig>


More information about the cypherpunks mailing list