All perfectly rational suppositions. Except:

Post #386,049 by Ashton 1/31/14 11:29:53 PM Reply	All perfectly rational suppositions. Except: The Massive Delusion behind [what should be a 'Definition of Limits'--on grounds of Sanity.] ie Collecting fucking-EVERYTHING.. proving, merely/ONLY that: technologically it IS POSSIBLE.. beggars any definition of that word, rational. 'Open-ended' is no Directive at All: it leaves available to the imaginations of a very-few to simply and perpetually conflate the idea of CAN with (any cockamamie personal predilection) --to" Get It All" --whether personal fortune, 24/7 endless-sex or: 7 billion chattering mouth-noises. Jeez, just HOW Off-the-Wall MUST this get? before some Adult says, Go To Your Room, children! (I no words for how silly==Insane-silly this-all simply FEELS: on the bald-face of the epitome of Excess.)
Post #386,062 by Another Scott 2/1/14 10:23:27 AM Reply	Dunno. Collecting fucking-EVERYTHING.. proving, merely/ONLY that: technologically it IS POSSIBLE.. beggars any definition of that word, rational. DataMining isn't going to go away. Remember (one of) the criticism after 9/11 that the US had all kinds of information about the 19 hijackers but couldn't connect the dots? Finding ways to connect the dots became a priority. It wasn't just a power-grab - there was a genuine need to be able to do intelligence and analysis faster and smarter while staying within the law. Remember Total Information Awareness? http://en.wikipedia....rmation_Awareness The program was suspended in late 2003 by the United States Congress after media reports criticized the government for attempting to establish "Total Information Awareness" over all citizens.[9][10][11] Although the program was formally suspended, its data mining software was later adopted by other government agencies, with only superficial changes being made. According to a 2012 New York Times article, the legacy of Total Information Awareness is "quietly thriving" at the National Security Agency (NSA).[12] [...] Early developments[edit] The earliest version of TIA employed a software called Groove, which was developed in 2000 by the American software industry entrepreneur and inventor of Lotus Notes, Ray Ozzie. The software developed by Ozzie makes it possible for analysts at many different government agencies to share intelligence data instantly, and it links specialized programs that are designed to look for patterns of suspicious behavior.[13] Congressional restrictions[edit] On 24 January 2003, the United States Senate voted to limit the TIA program by restricting its ability to gather information from electronic mails and the commercial databases of health, financial and travel companies.[14] Several months later, with increasing public outrage, Congress agreed to to terminate the program and cease its funding.[15] In May 2003, Total Information Awareness was renamed as Terrorist Information Awareness.[16] Tools like these aren't going to go away. Databases aren't going to get smaller. The genie is out of the bottle. Congress can step in and explicitly tell the NSA "don't do that" at any time. Our protections are in having the right people overseeing the programs, and the right people writing and enforcing the laws and procedures. We need both. On the underlying problem - how to fight (suicide) bomber terrorism in the US (and that is the bottom line that has driven all of this since the embassy bombings in Africa in 1998, it seems to me) - is increasingly rare but potentially catastrophic. It may be too rare for even a state-of-the-art TIA program to solve. Should cost-benefit analysis be applied to this problem? Should we just accept that risk and shut down these datamining programs? Yes, we accept many more likely risks of catastrophe (guns at home, MRSA in hospitals, poorly inspected foods, unvaccinated children, drunk drivers, etc.) without much thought. (But, in fairness, those problems aren't the same as instantly causing thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in damage.) Should (suicide) bombing be in the same category? Objectively - maybe yes. The bombing risk is too small and too easily minimized without multi-billion dollar programs. Good police work by good people is more likely to keep us safe than some one-in-a-trillion connection in a network mesh. "Security theatre" at airports including patting down grandma isn't stopping suicide bombers. But that's a hard case to make, especially when people running the program claim it has been effective in at least some cases ... FWIW. Cheers, Scott.
Post #386,064 by drook 2/1/14 10:30:30 AM Reply	Data wasn't the problem As you said, they had all kinds of information but couldn't connect the dots. All the NSA is doing is creating more dots. The promise of data mining is to spot trends, but that leads to Minority Report at worst, highly-targeted profiling at best. They presented a memo to Bush warning of the plans to attack. It was ignored among the avalanche of other warnings. -- Drew
Post #386,067 by Another Scott 2/1/14 1:34:59 PM Reply	Dunno. Yes, more data will make the problem worse if they don't know how to distill it. If you believe the reports, they only actually query the metadata a few hundred/few thousand times a year. They should be able to connect dots in that case. They presented a memo to Bush warning of the plans to attack. It was ignored among the avalanche of other warnings. Apparently the infamous Presidential Daily Briefing paper - "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US" - was declassified and released in 2004. It's here - http://www2.gwu.edu/..._laden_file02.pdf (2 page .pdf). There isn't a lot of meat there. Richard Clarke's hair may have been on fire about it, but it doesn't come across in the memo. Even if he had taken it seriously, what were they wanting Bush to do? Yes, Bush was incompetent, but the people working on the problem weren't able to connect the dots and get the appropriate information up the chain to whoever prepared the memo. FWIW. Cheers, Scott.

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