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Of course the NSA needs this ability -- as an agency whose recognized goal is having information, they of course will always need all information. The question

Of course the NSA needs this ability -- as an agency whose recognized goal is having information, they of course will always need all information. The question is whether we need the NSA, and whether we're willing to forfeit our rights and principles to provide them with all information.

dm2 12y ago
Our "rights" were put in place before mass communications were available, long before the internet was conceived. Presidents being shot. Planes flying into buildings. A nuclear weapon or any bomb being detonated inside of the country are all things that I do not want to happen. I don't know how to prevent these without SIGINT dominance. If these events can be prevented without the chance of any human using the collected data for any other purpose and the data only being stored for a very short period of time, then I'd have to say I'm on the side of the NSA. I think that corporations and law-enforcement agencies using intelligence and mass collection techniques are much more of a threat. Yes, the sharing and data-retention of the NSA should be greatly limited and controlled and monitored in my opinion, but eliminating their ability to protect the country (their ultimate goal) might not be worth it.
- pwg 12y ago
  Read up on the "base rate fallacy" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy). Specifically example 3 from the Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy#Example_3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy#Example_3). The result of the "base rate fallacy" in the context of the bulk data collection program is that the false positives will swamp the true positives in any general search results from the data-set.
  - dm2 12y ago
    Regarding Example #3, you investigate ~10,000 citizens and only ~100 are real terrorists, when we are talking about peoples lives, it's worth saving as many as possible in my opinion. There is also the fear aspect that is difficult to calculate. How does fear of a terrorist attack affect the economy? Just look at the Ford Pinto. It was calculated that it would be cheaper to pay the families of victims than it was to fix the exploding gas tank.
    - simoncion 12y ago
      > it's worth saving as many as possible in my opinion. You don't mean this. If you did, you would support mandatory exercise regimens and diet monitoring, and aggressive eugenics programs that include mandatory sterilization of folks at very high risk for nonviable offspring. > [Pinto anecdote] The facts seem to disagree with you. Read page eight (listed as page 1020 in the text) of this PDF: http://www.pointoflaw.com/articles/The_Myth_of_the_Ford_Pinto_Case.pdf http://www.pointoflaw.com/articles/The_Myth_of_the_Ford_Pint...
      - dm2 12y ago
        > "You don't mean this. If you did, you would support mandatory exercise regimens and diet monitoring, and aggressive eugenics programs that include mandatory sterilization of folks at very high risk for nonviable offspring." You can't compare dying in a terrorist attack to the personal choice of not exercising or eating unhealthy. On page 1037 of the Schwartz Paper you linked to it stated that the California Supreme Court's opinion was that it actually encouraged auto manufacturers to consider the safety trade-offs in the sake of cost. I fundamentally disagree with this. I personally think that consumer responsibility to research every safety aspect of every product they purchase is bullshit. There should be no corners cut when it comes to safety and if there are then it should be made known to the customer before purchasing the product. The majority of people and decision makers disagree with me, but that's the great thing about this country and the internet, freedom to disagree and participate in open discussion.
        pdkl95 12y ago
        > You can't compare dying in a terrorist attack to the personal choice of not exercising or eating unhealthy. Indeed - after all, the risk from a terrorist attack is so many orders of magnitude less likely we can often ignore it completely. It's noise, and deserves little special preparation. On the other hand, heart disease and other diet related problems are one of the largest risks faced.
        dm2 12y ago
  - csandreasen 12y ago
    That's a rather simplistic model. What happens when a non-terrorist is scanned twice? Does he have the same 1% probability of being a false positive (e.g.: false positive due to limitations of the camera, direction he's facing, atmospheric conditions, etc.) or 100% chance of being a false positive every time? (e.g.: he looks identical to one of the terrorists) The problem as stated suggests that there's an equal chance of being a false positive every time. In that case, the simple solution would be to place cameras at regular intervals - when an alarm goes off, wait a minute or two. If an alarm for an adjacent camera goes off, compare the two photos and see if it's the same guy. You've now significantly reduced both your false positive rate and false negative rate. One of the thing that always bugs me is that whenever privacy/security issues come up is that everyone seems to assume that the authorities are naturally going to gravitate to the least efficient, most invasive means of carrying out their job, simultaneously implying that it's preferable to have (in this example) 100 terrorist operating amongst us and not do anything than to put our heads together and propose an intelligent solution.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      > One of the thing that always bugs me is that whenever privacy/security issues come up is that everyone seems to assume that the authorities are naturally going to gravitate to the least efficient, most invasive means of carrying out their job, Have you flown in the past 10 years? Shuffling through TSA checkpoints in my socks makes me feel like authorities do gravitate to stupid measures.
      - dm2 12y ago
        In all fairness, that was in direct response to some idiot getting on a plane with a shoe bomb. I don't think it's necessary, but if they didn't require that then people would be blaming them for not taking enough action. The times I've flown it hasn't been too much of a hassle, though I suppose it's highly dependent on the airports you pass through and whether or not it's an international flight coming into the US.
      - csandreasen 12y ago
        I was thinking more along the lines of things like speed cameras - they capture more speeding violations, don't discriminate based on race/gender/whether or not you're driving an expensive car/etc., and they note only the fact that the driver violated the speed limit. The driver gets a fine in the mail shortly after. It improves on the model where the police only pull over a fraction of violators, and you spend 15 minutes waiting, subject to intimidation, further questioning by the officer, the officer gets to glance in your windows to see if there's anything else that violates the law, and in the end you still get a fine. Yet, almost everyone I've talked to about speed cameras hates them and sees them as invasive, sometimes going so far as calling them Orwellian. I agree about the TSA checkpoints, though. There are plenty of examples on both sides of the arguments. My point is that the general assumption seems to gravitate to "they'll implement it stupidly, so they shouldn't have that capability at all". It's not necessarily a binary choice between no security and stupid implementation.
  - pdkl95 12y ago
    https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/data_mining_for.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/data_mining_f... Schneier has written on this problem a number of times. I suspect this problem may be caused by the well-known problems many people have with Bayes Theorem and how to properly use it.
- sarahj 12y ago
  Realize that one screwed up person with a gun and opportunity could action the first scenario. Pilots licenses are more of a matter of cost than ideology, and private planes aren’t subject to many of the security measures commercial airliners are. And the only group of people in the history of the world who have used a nuclear weapon to harm innocent civilians was the united states government. Chaotic events happen. People are terrified of them but having billions of dollars worth of surveillance state does not reduce the risk one iota.
- gtaylor 12y ago
  > If these events can be prevented without the chance of any human using the collected data for any other purpose and the data only being stored for a very short period of time, then I'd have to say I'm on the side of the NSA. This simply can't/won't happen. Human nature dictates that this data can't be held and dealt with responsibly.
- emiliobumachar 12y ago
  upvoted, because your opinion does not deserve to be grayed out like that just because of disagreement. But I do disagree. Do not assume mass surveillance can happen "without the chance of any human using the collected data for any other purpose". That's fairy tales. Look up "Loveint",think about everyone you ever dated and their exes. Commercial use is not unheard of, either. Even if - if! - nothing much darker goes on yet, what would stop corruption in the future? That's a much greater threat than terrorism.
- PavlovsCat 12y ago
  > Presidents being shot. Planes flying into buildings. A nuclear weapon or any bomb being detonated inside of the country are all things that I do not want to happen. I don't know how to prevent these without SIGINT dominance. I don't think they can be prevented with "SIGINT dominance" either. But more importantly, to me: the idea of consitutional and human rights is that it was agreed, roughtly, that "these things are required to live a dignified, free life". Not literally, but I do think that is the rough idea. So taking away from that is akin to killing everybody. It's not even burning the village to save the village, it's burning the whole village to save a tiny part of it. In a follow-upp comment you said "when we are talking about peoples lives, it's worth saving as many as possible in my opinion" and I agree. For example, stop mass surveillance, stop selling weapons like candy, persecute war criminals (I mean the ones having a ball and getting invited to gala dinners on home soil, not the ones around the globe in areas of geostrategic interest), that sort of stuff. Otherwise, I'll stick with believing a lot of "security" stuff is just lip service, a way to transfer tax payer money into private pockets without achieving anything other than more control of the domestic population. I'm not talking about cogs in the machine, mind you, but the machine itself. I don't doubt many people in the NSA or elsewhere have good intentions, I just think that's worth very little in the bigger scheme of things.

dm2 12y ago

Our "rights" were put in place before mass communications were available, long before the internet was conceived. Presidents being shot. Planes flying into buildings. A nuclear weapon or any bomb being detonated inside of the country are all things that I do not want to happen. I don't know how to prevent these without SIGINT dominance. If these events can be prevented without the chance of any human using the collected data for any other purpose and the data only being stored for a very short period of time, then I'd have to say I'm on the side of the NSA. I think that corporations and law-enforcement agencies using intelligence and mass collection techniques are much more of a threat. Yes, the sharing and data-retention of the NSA should be greatly limited and controlled and monitored in my opinion, but eliminating their ability to protect the country (their ultimate goal) might not be worth it.

pwg 12y ago
Read up on the "base rate fallacy" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy). Specifically example 3 from the Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy#Example_3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy#Example_3). The result of the "base rate fallacy" in the context of the bulk data collection program is that the false positives will swamp the true positives in any general search results from the data-set.
- dm2 12y ago
  Regarding Example #3, you investigate ~10,000 citizens and only ~100 are real terrorists, when we are talking about peoples lives, it's worth saving as many as possible in my opinion. There is also the fear aspect that is difficult to calculate. How does fear of a terrorist attack affect the economy? Just look at the Ford Pinto. It was calculated that it would be cheaper to pay the families of victims than it was to fix the exploding gas tank.
  - simoncion 12y ago
    > it's worth saving as many as possible in my opinion. You don't mean this. If you did, you would support mandatory exercise regimens and diet monitoring, and aggressive eugenics programs that include mandatory sterilization of folks at very high risk for nonviable offspring. > [Pinto anecdote] The facts seem to disagree with you. Read page eight (listed as page 1020 in the text) of this PDF: http://www.pointoflaw.com/articles/The_Myth_of_the_Ford_Pinto_Case.pdf http://www.pointoflaw.com/articles/The_Myth_of_the_Ford_Pint...
    - dm2 12y ago
      > "You don't mean this. If you did, you would support mandatory exercise regimens and diet monitoring, and aggressive eugenics programs that include mandatory sterilization of folks at very high risk for nonviable offspring." You can't compare dying in a terrorist attack to the personal choice of not exercising or eating unhealthy. On page 1037 of the Schwartz Paper you linked to it stated that the California Supreme Court's opinion was that it actually encouraged auto manufacturers to consider the safety trade-offs in the sake of cost. I fundamentally disagree with this. I personally think that consumer responsibility to research every safety aspect of every product they purchase is bullshit. There should be no corners cut when it comes to safety and if there are then it should be made known to the customer before purchasing the product. The majority of people and decision makers disagree with me, but that's the great thing about this country and the internet, freedom to disagree and participate in open discussion.
      - pdkl95 12y ago
        > You can't compare dying in a terrorist attack to the personal choice of not exercising or eating unhealthy. Indeed - after all, the risk from a terrorist attack is so many orders of magnitude less likely we can often ignore it completely. It's noise, and deserves little special preparation. On the other hand, heart disease and other diet related problems are one of the largest risks faced.
        dm2 12y ago
- csandreasen 12y ago
  That's a rather simplistic model. What happens when a non-terrorist is scanned twice? Does he have the same 1% probability of being a false positive (e.g.: false positive due to limitations of the camera, direction he's facing, atmospheric conditions, etc.) or 100% chance of being a false positive every time? (e.g.: he looks identical to one of the terrorists) The problem as stated suggests that there's an equal chance of being a false positive every time. In that case, the simple solution would be to place cameras at regular intervals - when an alarm goes off, wait a minute or two. If an alarm for an adjacent camera goes off, compare the two photos and see if it's the same guy. You've now significantly reduced both your false positive rate and false negative rate. One of the thing that always bugs me is that whenever privacy/security issues come up is that everyone seems to assume that the authorities are naturally going to gravitate to the least efficient, most invasive means of carrying out their job, simultaneously implying that it's preferable to have (in this example) 100 terrorist operating amongst us and not do anything than to put our heads together and propose an intelligent solution.
  - DanBC 12y ago
    > One of the thing that always bugs me is that whenever privacy/security issues come up is that everyone seems to assume that the authorities are naturally going to gravitate to the least efficient, most invasive means of carrying out their job, Have you flown in the past 10 years? Shuffling through TSA checkpoints in my socks makes me feel like authorities do gravitate to stupid measures.
    - dm2 12y ago
      In all fairness, that was in direct response to some idiot getting on a plane with a shoe bomb. I don't think it's necessary, but if they didn't require that then people would be blaming them for not taking enough action. The times I've flown it hasn't been too much of a hassle, though I suppose it's highly dependent on the airports you pass through and whether or not it's an international flight coming into the US.
    - csandreasen 12y ago
      I was thinking more along the lines of things like speed cameras - they capture more speeding violations, don't discriminate based on race/gender/whether or not you're driving an expensive car/etc., and they note only the fact that the driver violated the speed limit. The driver gets a fine in the mail shortly after. It improves on the model where the police only pull over a fraction of violators, and you spend 15 minutes waiting, subject to intimidation, further questioning by the officer, the officer gets to glance in your windows to see if there's anything else that violates the law, and in the end you still get a fine. Yet, almost everyone I've talked to about speed cameras hates them and sees them as invasive, sometimes going so far as calling them Orwellian. I agree about the TSA checkpoints, though. There are plenty of examples on both sides of the arguments. My point is that the general assumption seems to gravitate to "they'll implement it stupidly, so they shouldn't have that capability at all". It's not necessarily a binary choice between no security and stupid implementation.
- pdkl95 12y ago
  https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/data_mining_for.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/data_mining_f... Schneier has written on this problem a number of times. I suspect this problem may be caused by the well-known problems many people have with Bayes Theorem and how to properly use it.
sarahj 12y ago
Realize that one screwed up person with a gun and opportunity could action the first scenario. Pilots licenses are more of a matter of cost than ideology, and private planes aren’t subject to many of the security measures commercial airliners are. And the only group of people in the history of the world who have used a nuclear weapon to harm innocent civilians was the united states government. Chaotic events happen. People are terrified of them but having billions of dollars worth of surveillance state does not reduce the risk one iota.
gtaylor 12y ago
> If these events can be prevented without the chance of any human using the collected data for any other purpose and the data only being stored for a very short period of time, then I'd have to say I'm on the side of the NSA. This simply can't/won't happen. Human nature dictates that this data can't be held and dealt with responsibly.
emiliobumachar 12y ago
upvoted, because your opinion does not deserve to be grayed out like that just because of disagreement. But I do disagree. Do not assume mass surveillance can happen "without the chance of any human using the collected data for any other purpose". That's fairy tales. Look up "Loveint",think about everyone you ever dated and their exes. Commercial use is not unheard of, either. Even if - if! - nothing much darker goes on yet, what would stop corruption in the future? That's a much greater threat than terrorism.
PavlovsCat 12y ago
> Presidents being shot. Planes flying into buildings. A nuclear weapon or any bomb being detonated inside of the country are all things that I do not want to happen. I don't know how to prevent these without SIGINT dominance. I don't think they can be prevented with "SIGINT dominance" either. But more importantly, to me: the idea of consitutional and human rights is that it was agreed, roughtly, that "these things are required to live a dignified, free life". Not literally, but I do think that is the rough idea. So taking away from that is akin to killing everybody. It's not even burning the village to save the village, it's burning the whole village to save a tiny part of it. In a follow-upp comment you said "when we are talking about peoples lives, it's worth saving as many as possible in my opinion" and I agree. For example, stop mass surveillance, stop selling weapons like candy, persecute war criminals (I mean the ones having a ball and getting invited to gala dinners on home soil, not the ones around the globe in areas of geostrategic interest), that sort of stuff. Otherwise, I'll stick with believing a lot of "security" stuff is just lip service, a way to transfer tax payer money into private pockets without achieving anything other than more control of the domestic population. I'm not talking about cogs in the machine, mind you, but the machine itself. I don't doubt many people in the NSA or elsewhere have good intentions, I just think that's worth very little in the bigger scheme of things.