We are at war with terror (and have been, and always will be), just as we are and have always been at war with Eastasia, but that is completely irrelevant to th

We are at war with terror (and have been, and always will be), just as we are and have always been at war with Eastasia, but that is completely irrelevant to the question of whether massive domestic surveillance with poor oversight and even poorer accountability is a good idea. Even if your goal is solely to prevent terrorist attacks and you don't give a damn about domestic collateral, it is still not so obvious. The question is whether, with all the data in the world, there are signals in that data that are exclusively correlated with terrorists and terrorist activities. And, secondarily, whether data mining and ML techniques have found, or can in the near future find, those signals. If not, then, in Schneier's words: "Piling more data onto the mix makes it harder, not easier. The best way to think of it is a needle-in-a-haystack problem; the last thing you want to do is increase the amount of hay you have to search through." [1] [1] http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/02/opinion/schneier-boston-bombing http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/02/opinion/schneier-boston-bombin...