Schneier is making the exact same mistake in that article that I pointed out in the Wikipedia article - he is propping up an overly simplistic hypothetical syst

Schneier is making the exact same mistake in that article that I pointed out in the Wikipedia article - he is propping up an overly simplistic hypothetical system with a given error rate, then stating that the authorities have to waste their time investigating every single instance without applying any further filtering. I don't know where Schneier is getting his numbers from, as there is significantly less than 1 billion people in the US at any given point in time, and no one in the FBI is going to advocate for using a system that requires them to investigate nearly one tenth of the U.S. population every day. This also doesn't match with real-world numbers that we know on the NSA metadata program. Schneier was saying immediately after 9/11, the FBI was getting thousands of tips per month, which may very well have been the case back then. But the Presidential Review Group report stated that in 2012 a total of 12 tips were passed to the FBI[1]. To me, that indicates that they've become much better at getting rid false positives. Schneier's hypothetical program also isn't analogous because it starts by scanning everyone to determine if one is or is not a terrorist, but the actual NSA metadata program (according to Review Group, same article cited above) starts out by examining people the NSA has already identified as terrorists through other means - the controversy isn't in the accuracy rate, it's in the method of collection. [1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-r-stone/nsa-meta-data_b_4499934.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-r-stone/nsa-meta-data...