Thursday, March 24, 2016

What the Terror Attacks are Revealing About the Electronic Spies

They seem to be showing that the billions of dollars and pounds consumed by the NSA and GCHQ have been poured down a rathole. For the last fourteen years, those snoops have been telling us that if they have free rein to spy on everyone and use everything, that they can detect the terrorists and their supporting networks.

There's no civil liberties issue with them monitoring what goes on in France and Belgium or Syria.

Where is the evidence that the electronic spies are worth what they have been paid? Where is there proof that the massive data collection, storage and analysis that the NSA has been doing has helps a whit?

5 comments:

  1. Frederick the Great is credited with the maxim "He who defends everything defends nothing." It seems clear the same applies to spying. Our electronic spies are drowning in ever larger seas of data, wondering why it keeps getting harder to find the needle even as they throw more hay on the stack.

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  2. Yes and it's always better to find the needle before it gets into the haystack.

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  3. The bad guys have adapted. Most recent attacks have been by brothers, spouses, first cousins... They're not using electronic communications at all!

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  4. Terror and Security have become big business. Now we also have Pot as a new business. Industry even.
    Perhaps the powers that be might now dream up a new industry for the rest of us also?
    w3ski

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  5. Joe, they're using electronic communications, but they're using them to coordinate already-made plans, not to make those plans, and there's so much data being hoovered up by the NSA etc. that they have no way to analyze it all to find those needles in one big frickin' haystack. I work in the data analysis field and finding patterns in a much simpler haystack of data takes a ton of CPU horsepower and iops. There isn't enough CPU horsepower and iops on the planet to do anything useful in real time with that massive pile that the NSA is hoovering, they can use it after the fact to find the connections to take down networks, but usually the terror cell has already blown its cover anyhow by that time. (LIterally).

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