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"The remaining 25 percent" [of reported 'illegal' interceptions] ", about 700 in total, were human error (e.g., typing mistakes). Put into perspective, the aver

"The remaining 25 percent" [of reported 'illegal' interceptions] ", about 700 in total, were human error (e.g., typing mistakes). Put into perspective, the average analyst at NSA makes a compliance mistake once every ten years." This does not reassure me. First, those are only the 'mistakes' that were detected and reported - which independent body is doing the oversight? Secondly, he says that their staff are just about perfect (an error rate of 1 per 10 years) whilst at the same time saying that the errors were typing mistakes. It is sad to see a Mathematician reduced to such deceit.

xnull1guest 12y ago
First, note how the only numbers addressed are the '2,776 instances publicly known'. So from the start we're working with unreasonable numbers. But let's run with it. Hmm. If the average number of mistakes an analyst makes is 0.1 per year and there were 700 mistakes only, this means 7000 analysts (or do we need to model this as a poisson distribution?). Is 7,000 analysts reasonable? Anyone have more details on this? The NSA has said that it performs about 20 million queries a month, or 240 million queries a year. If these are done by analysts that's 16 manual queries an hour or 130 a day assuming a standard work week. That seems reasonable. Or at least reasonable"ish". [240,000,000 / 7,000 / (5/7 * 8 * 365)] But it would also imply an error rate of 700/24,000,000 = 0.000002917 (which is absurd, if the error are presumably due to 'typos').