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Three degrees of separation: breaking down the NSA's 'hops' surveillance method
- a3n 13y agoIt should be one hop out from someone actually suspected and under investigation, and then each individual hopped out to is briefly analyzed for innocuous vs suspicious communication. Then out once from those few individuals again. "That would be too hard." Well, good. They aren't supposed to be figuring out how to spy on everyone. The Constitution made it hard by design, and it's only recent technology that allows them to do this mostly unnoticed. Three hops out from anyone who looks cross-eyed is just a construction of convenience that looks reasonable to a sleepy or collaborating judge, and results in being "allowed" to spy on virtually everyone.
- logn 13y agoWith 25 'friends' online, your 3rd degree network of contacts is estimated at 667,489. Global population might be 7 billion. 7,000,000,000 / 700,000 == 10,000. I'm guessing 3 degrees was chosen because the NSA has enough targets to basically monitor anyone then.