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> I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected. Someone else on HN said it would be nice if the NSA published statistics o

> I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected. Someone else on HN said it would be nice if the NSA published statistics or something, data so aggregate you couldn't determine much from it, but still tells you "holy shit they prevented something crazy" levels of information, harder said than done without revealing too much.

wil421 9mo ago
In addition to terrorist stuff, they are probably passing of bunch of stuff to the military or defense industry to do things like fine tune their radar to cutting edge military secrets.
- giancarlostoro 9mo ago
  Would be nice if we had some form of statistics in a way that wouldnt endanger any of the intel that just tells the general public "we dont just sit here collecting PB of data daily"
  - dragonwriter 9mo ago
    Any statistics that didn't endanger the intel would also be unverifiable and easily falsified, and therefore not particularly trustworthy for the proposed purpose.
rtpg 9mo ago
The NSA tried to do this during the Snowden leaks! There were stories like "look at how we stopped this thing using all this data we've been scooping up"... but often the details lead to somewhat underwhelming realities, to say the least. It might be that this stuff is very useful, but only in very illegal ways.
- lazide 9mo ago
  Secrecy enables several things, including: - abuse - incompetence - getting away with breaking rules and laws Sometimes, those are desirable or necessary for national security/pragmatic reasons. For instance, good luck running an effective covert operation without being abusive to someone or breaking rules and laws somewhere! Usually (80/20 rule) it’s just used to be shitty and make a mess, or be incompetent while pretending to be hot shit. In a real war, these things usually get sorted out quickly because the results matter (existentially). Less so when no one can figure out who the actual enemy is, or what we’re even fighting (if anything).

wil421 9mo ago

In addition to terrorist stuff, they are probably passing of bunch of stuff to the military or defense industry to do things like fine tune their radar to cutting edge military secrets.

giancarlostoro 9mo ago
Would be nice if we had some form of statistics in a way that wouldnt endanger any of the intel that just tells the general public "we dont just sit here collecting PB of data daily"
- dragonwriter 9mo ago
  Any statistics that didn't endanger the intel would also be unverifiable and easily falsified, and therefore not particularly trustworthy for the proposed purpose.

rtpg 9mo ago

The NSA tried to do this during the Snowden leaks! There were stories like "look at how we stopped this thing using all this data we've been scooping up"... but often the details lead to somewhat underwhelming realities, to say the least. It might be that this stuff is very useful, but only in very illegal ways.

lazide 9mo ago
Secrecy enables several things, including: - abuse - incompetence - getting away with breaking rules and laws Sometimes, those are desirable or necessary for national security/pragmatic reasons. For instance, good luck running an effective covert operation without being abusive to someone or breaking rules and laws somewhere! Usually (80/20 rule) it’s just used to be shitty and make a mess, or be incompetent while pretending to be hot shit. In a real war, these things usually get sorted out quickly because the results matter (existentially). Less so when no one can figure out who the actual enemy is, or what we’re even fighting (if anything).