Hah you accidentally caught me in a math error! Sweep(X) = 0.6 * X * 0.6 * X = 0.36 * X^2 I transposed the "percent of overlap" with "percent not overlapped"

Hah you accidentally caught me in a math error! Sweep(X) = 0.6 * X * 0.6 * X = 0.36 * X^2 I transposed the "percent of overlap" with "percent not overlapped" and viola problems. If there's a 40% overlap from one person's social network to another that means that 60% of their social graph isn't included in the first person's and thus it's new for the sake of the two-hops strategy. NumTargets(X,overlap) = 300mm / Sweep(X,overlap) = 300mm / ((1-overlap)*X)^2 NumTargets(100,99%) = 300mm NumTargets(1000, 99%) = 3mm NumTargets(100, 5%) = 33241 NumTargets(1000, 5%) = 332 So it's actually even worse then even I initially expected because the reach of the two hops method is doubly-quadratic. It's quadratic in terms of how much overlap there is from one person's social/business network to the next AND it's quadratic in how many connections each person has. We're piling assumptions on top of assumptions here but lets suppose that at least 100k is the minimum number of targets we're comfortable with the NSA having to snoop on before they get everyone's data. It's not the right number but it's illustrative. According to the spreadsheet I just put together we can satisfy this in a number of ways: overlap = 99%, X just about all realistic numbers overlap = 90%, X ~ 600 or less overlap = 80%, X ~ 280 or less overlap = 60%, X ~ 120 or less overlap = 40%, X ~ 90 or less overlap = 20%, X ~ 70 or less overlap = 5%, X ~ 60 or less There's no region that's got clearly reasonable assumptions where the NSA can't with a little bit of work get all the call records on all Americans again. In other words, if it took overlap = 5% and X = 20,000 (to me not that realistic) in order to make it "easy" for the NSA to collect everyone's call records I might be less incensed. But the way this scales there's no reasonable assumptions that make it incredibly difficult for the NSA to vacuum up data on everyone.