by hilzoy
The Washington Post has an excellent story on the NSA wiretap program today. It’s worth reading in its entirety, since it has a lot of interesting details. Among the highlights (note: while the first quote here is from the beginning of the article, some of the rest appear here in an order different from that found in the article. I.e., each passage is quoted verbatim and with relevant context, but the second passage I quote appears after the third in the article itself.):
“Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use.
Bush has recently described the warrantless operation as “terrorist surveillance” and summed it up by declaring that “if you’re talking to a member of al Qaeda, we want to know why.” But officials conversant with the program said a far more common question for eavesdroppers is whether, not why, a terrorist plotter is on either end of the call. The answer, they said, is usually no.
Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well. That step still requires a warrant from a federal judge, for which the government must supply evidence of probable cause.
The Bush administration refuses to say — in public or in closed session of Congress — how many Americans in the past four years have had their conversations recorded or their e-mails read by intelligence analysts without court authority. Two knowledgeable sources placed that number in the thousands; one of them, more specific, said about 5,000.
The program has touched many more Americans than that. Surveillance takes place in several stages, officials said, the earliest by machine. Computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears.”
This is predictable.
As I tried to explain once in comments (echoing other bloggers like Matt Yglesias; here’s another explanation, this one in engineering terms, for Slarti 😉 ), anytime you try to use a screening test to find people with a given trait, and that trait is relatively rare (as “being a terrorist” is), you’re almost guaranteed to be swamped by false positives: cases in which the test for the trait comes out positive, but it’s wrong. In that comment, I estimated that if there are 20,000 terrorists in the US (surely way high), and the error rate on our test is a tiny 1%, and we screen the entire population, then we will end up flagging as terrorists some 2,995,935 people, the overwhelming majority of whom will be innocent.
In the case of the pattern matching used by the NSA, consider this:
“An alternative approach, in which a knowledgeable source said the NSA’s work parallels academic and commercial counterparts, relies on “decomposing an audio signal” to find qualities useful to pattern analysis. Among the fields involved are acoustic engineering, behavioral psychology and computational linguistics.
A published report for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said machines can easily determine the sex, approximate age and social class of a speaker. They are also learning to look for clues to deceptive intent in the words and “paralinguistic” features of a conversation, such as pitch, tone, cadence and latency.
This kind of analysis can predict with results “a hell of a lot better than chance” the likelihood that the speakers are trying to conceal their true meaning, according to James W. Pennebaker, who chairs the psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin.
“Frankly, we’ll probably be wrong 99 percent of the time,” he said, “but 1 percent is far better than 1 in 100 million times if you were just guessing at random. And this is where the culture has to make some decisions.””
If a 1% rate of false positives leads to three million innocent people under surveillance, just think what a 1% chance of getting the right answer will do! The administration has not really addressed the question how many innocent people it is prepared to place under surveillance in order to catch one person who is in some way connected to al Qaeda, preferring instead to say things like this:
“This is a limited program. This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner. These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings and churches.”
No false positives there! In the Post story, we get this low bar for success:
“Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the nation’s second-ranking intelligence officer, acknowledged in a news briefing last month that eavesdroppers “have to go down some blind alleys to find the tips that pay off.” (…) Vice President Cheney has made the administration’s strongest claim about the program’s intelligence value, telling CNN in December that eavesdropping without warrants “has saved thousands of lives.” Asked about that Thursday, Hayden told senators he “cannot personally estimate” such a figure but that the program supplied information “that would not otherwise have been available.””
Well: I’m certainly glad to know that the program supplied at least some information that would not otherwise have been available. Otherwise, it would have been, quite literally, a complete waste of perfectly good time, effort, and Constitutions. But saying that this program provided some information that wouldn’t be available otherwise doesn’t tell us much about what sorts of tradeoffs, exactly, the administration is willing to make, and it doesn’t even come close to the sort of public debate that serious constitutional questions deserve.
For one thing, the relation between the number of people listened to and the number who turn out to be terrorists affects the legal basis for the program:
“The scale of warrantless surveillance, and the high proportion of bystanders swept in, sheds new light on Bush’s circumvention of the courts. National security lawyers, in and out of government, said the washout rate raised fresh doubts about the program’s lawfulness under the Fourth Amendment, because a search cannot be judged “reasonable” if it is based on evidence that experience shows to be unreliable. Other officials said the disclosures might shift the terms of public debate, altering perceptions about the balance between privacy lost and security gained. (…)
Valuable information remains valuable even if it comes from one in a thousand intercepts. But government officials and lawyers said the ratio of success to failure matters greatly when eavesdropping subjects are Americans or U.S. visitors with constitutional protection. The minimum legal definition of probable cause, said a government official who has studied the program closely, is that evidence used to support eavesdropping ought to turn out to be “right for one out of every two guys at least.” Those who devised the surveillance plan, the official said, “knew they could never meet that standard — that’s why they didn’t go through” the court that supervises the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.
Michael J. Woods, who was chief of the FBI’s national security law unit until 2002, said in an e-mail interview that even using the lesser standard of a “reasonable basis” requires evidence “that would lead a prudent, appropriately experienced person” to believe the American is a terrorist agent. If a factor returned “a large number of false positives, I would have to conclude that the factor is not a sufficiently reliable indicator and thus would carry less (or no) weight.”
Bush has said his program covers only overseas calls to or from the United States and stated categorically that “we will not listen inside this country” without a warrant. Hayden said the government goes to the intelligence court when an eavesdropping subject becomes important enough to “drill down,” as he put it, “to the degree that we need all communications.”
Yet a special channel set up for just that purpose four years ago has gone largely unused, according to an authoritative account. Since early 2002, when the presiding judge of the federal intelligence court first learned of Bush’s program, he agreed to a system in which prosecutors may apply for a domestic warrant after warrantless eavesdropping on the same person’s overseas communications. The annual number of such applications, a source said, has been in the single digits.”
It also raises the question whether the program is an effective use of our law enforcement and intelligence resources. We know that the FBI officers who had to track down the leads it produced didn’t think so. We also know that the NSA surveillance program will lead to a lot of legal challenges to ongoing prosecutions of terrorists (and if you didn’t read ReddHedd’s reaction to this at the time, read it now — she’s a former prosecutor, and has a very good feel for what this will mean.) The costs are already quite clear. The benefits are not. And excuse me if I don’t take Cheney’s word for it that thousands of lives have been saved — his performance before the invasion of Iraq made it quite clear that when he has decided something is a good idea, he’s prepared to flatly lie in order to give the impression that it has to happen.
The article also contains a lot of detail on how the program actually works (though not enough, I’d think, to let anyone know how to circumvent it, other than to stop using electronic means of communication.) For me, though, the money quote is this one:
“Jeff Jonas, now chief scientist at IBM Entity Analytics, invented a data-mining technology used widely in the private sector and by the government. He sympathizes, he said, with an analyst facing an unknown threat who gathers enormous volumes of data “and says, ‘There must be a secret in there.’ “
But pattern matching, he argued, will not find it. Techniques that “look at people’s behavior to predict terrorist intent,” he said, “are so far from reaching the level of accuracy that’s necessary that I see them as nothing but civil liberty infringement engines.””
My slightly self-centered post here.
I’ve seen that Glenn Greenwald and Sifu Tweety Fish haven’t posted at all today. Kevin gave a link to the story last night, and said he’d address it in the morning. It now being past 3 p.m. in California, I assume he’s having a late morning. Will check Matt’s various blogs soon.
I don’t expect a link from any of them, or an apology for saying I was wrong, nor will I count on one from my friend Avedon who thought I was making much about unimportant points and blogged that thought, nor from anyone of the 100% of bloggers who utterly ignored this post, which not a single blogger linked to, despite my e-mailing all over, nor from any of the bloggers who didn’t link to this post, although several did, after I e-mailed pretty much every blogger I’ve ever had contact with, nor any of the other dozens of posts I’ve made on these points, all ignored by everyone.
I’m glad this is on the front page of the Washington Post; getting the info out is, of course, what’s important, not the fact that I’VE BEEN SAYING ALL THIS FOR MONTHS and being generally either mocked, disagreed with, or ignored. The latter is just a little selfish thing of mine; the former is incredibly important.
The latter does frustrate me more than a tad, though. It’s really really frustrating to work up to the point where, after months of blogging, one is making posts about “Shouting Until I’m Blue In The Face,” and is still ignored, while you are sure you are right and know more about the topic than the Big Name Bloggers dismissing you.
Good post, of course, Hilzoy.
Incidentally, as noted here, and in the previous posts linked there, the only other blogger I’ve seen who had a clue was Noah Schactman, now of DefenseTech. If anyone has seen any other bloggers posting about datamining and machine-scanning in the NSA Program back in December, or even in January, I’d really like to know.
Yeah, nothing from Matt on this, either; he’s off today, clearly. His last post at Tapped was Friday; for Tapped, weekends only happen after they’re over, not a place for breaking news, and what you get with paid bloggers; on TPM, his only post from yesterday was on the critical topic of football.
Just noting. Kind of a drawback of paid Big Name Bloggers.
Fewer than ten serious suspects out of 5000 investigations. Sounds like they have more than 99.8% false positives.
How accurate are these computer analyses?
“What’s that song I hear in the background?”
“That? Oh. Summertime.”
“Is John still angry?”
“Yes. I hope he doesn’t blow up at the bridge game.”
Or the standard:
“Hello, Susan?”
“Yes. Oh, hi Jack”
I think the false positive argument is weak because it implies that warrantless surveillance is OK if the false positive rate can be reduced below some threshold. If, as seems likely, the NSA project involves data mining with some sort of followup, then 3*10^6 false positives in the first round (assuming 99% accuracy, as in the post) becomes 3*10^4 in the second level of inspection, 300 in the third level of inspection, and 3 at the fourth level. If the first level of analysis is just voice stress, and the next two levels of inspection involve monitoring call/email patterns, travel records and so on, then the number of innocent people actually listened to by a human is only 300.
We know that at least some of what the intelligence apparatus is doing is less accurate than that, due to complaints from the FBI about being buried in dead-end tips. In due course, the technology will improve, and it will continue to improve until any nonzero false positive criterion can be met. The problem is not false positives, it’s listening without probable cause.
The danger of TIA (which I think is what this is at base) is not that it doesn’t work, it’s that given time, money, and refinement it eventually will work, at least well enough. When that point comes it will inevitably expand beyond terrorism, to drugs, to every damn thing the government has decided is bad.
Quite right. (Just as the provisions of the Patriot Act were fairly immediately so used for all manner of non-terrorism-related criminal investigations.) Maybe not sooner, but later, if the President gets to make up the law, or the non-law, on his (or her — want President Hillary to have that power?) own.
togolosh: the point (as I see it) is: first, the fact that they did this without warrants is bad, period. Second, they have been saying all along that they have used a standard of reasonableness that’s something like probable cause. That wouldn’t make dispensing with warrants OK, by any stretch of the imagination, nor has it ever been plausible to me (if they could have gotten warrants, then why on earth didn’t they?), but it’s an argument that they have been making, which is now more or less completely dispensed with.
Third, one point of the ‘false positives’ argument, if you do the math, is that it’s not just a little bit below the 50% true positive rate cited in the article; given any remotely plausible assumption about the prevalence of terrorists in the general population, it’s likely to be wildly below it. This is important, I think, both because of the arguments themselves, but also because to the extent that people think that maybe 48 or 49% of the people who get listened to are genuine terrorists, they might have less of a problem with it; whereas if the numbers are much more likely to be one terrorist out of every ten thousand people who are put under surveillance, they are not.
“Second, they have been saying all along that they have used a standard of reasonableness that’s something like probable cause.”
I assume you saw the linked account of General Hayden’s understanding of the wording of the Fourth Amendment. (I’d quote the dialogue here, rather than just link to myself again, but it’s a bit long, though not all that much — just a bit long to stick in a comment; short version: he seems to have not noticed the “without probable cause” and “warrant” parts of the Fourth Amendment, just the use of the word “reasonable.”)
“(if they could have gotten warrants, then why on earth didn’t they?)”
Um, because of what I’ve been saying since December, and is again shown in the article you link, which is that you can’t get a warrant for datamining and machine-scanning hundreds of thousands of calls?
This seems to be odd phrasing and an odd question, to me. I may be being dense again, of course, and probably am.
Gary – I’m not a blogger, but I’ve commented on this issue in the past few months. Since my concerns go deeper than warrants and such, I believe I was accused of being a shill, but whatever.
Read your posts, but wasn’t sure if you were aware of some possible fixes. Don’t know if you’ve seen this (pdf) or this. (pdf)
Togolosh, you are postulating four tests that have 99% accuracy each and are completely independent. That’s equivalent to one test with 99.999999% accuracy. I’m sure that’s ludicrously beyond anything we have currently (in fact I doubt we’ll ever have that).
That said, the problem of expansion beyond terrorism is important, as is the inevitability that such a system will eventually be used against political opponents and even for the personal projects and vendettas of individual government employees.
“…but I’ve commented on this issue in the past few months.”
I’m afraid I’d missed seeing that; might I ask where?
“…Since my concerns go deeper than warrants and such….”
And they would be?
“Don’t know if you’ve seen this (pdf) or this. (pdf)”
No, I had not. Thank you muchly.
Togolosh, the false positve rate very much has a bearing. “Reasonableness” for both legal and constitutional analysis is evaluated in light of experience, as Hilzoy mentioned. If a program was about 50/50 you could make a very strong case for reasonableness given the magnitude of the harm. .2%? Not so much.
Gary –
1) Hit and Run
2) If they’re sweeping up reams of data from the telcos, what kind of storage do they possess? If they don’t have the storage capacity, are they outsourcing this function to private contractors? What kind of security , procedures, etc., would these contractors have in handling this data? What is the procedure and safeguards of the NSA in blacking out names, and disposing of irrelevant data that is mined?
I have more questions and thoughts on this, but it’s time for bed. I’ll have to sleep on it. 🙂
3) You’re welcome.
According to Wikipedia,
Would this be because of the Nov 2003 memo from his office?:
Yes, I believe so. I think Jay Rockefeller is a representative of many Democrats who will work to harm the US’s security in order to score political points. And I think that Sen Rockefeller is generally representative of his party as a whole.
Do I entirely trust the Bush administration with the monitoring of overseas phone calls? No, not really. Do I believe ABC radio when they never refer to this as anything but “domestic spying”? No. The networks are oversimplifying this, and quite frankly lying to us. Do I think that the Bush administration could have broken the law? I suppose so. Do I think that Democrats in general, and Jay Rockefeller really feel any responsibility for protecting Americans from terrorist attacks. No. They don’t care a bit. Democrats leaders don’t want to take the precautions necessary to keep America from being hit by terrorist attacks again because they do not bear the responsibilty. To me, that is the issue. Is it more important to hurt the Republicans, even if it compromises our nation’s security?
DaveC,
This is the same Rockefeller who hand wrote a letter to complain to the administration about possible problems and had the foresight to make a second handwritten copy to retain because he didn’t trust the administration, which was rewarded when it was claimed that no objections were raised? link
Is it more important to cast doubts on Democrats than to examine the questions they raise?
“I have more questions and thoughts on this….”
Good starter questions.
I read Hit And Run quite a bit, but not religiously.
“If they don’t have the storage capacity, are they outsourcing this function to private contractors?”
I doubt it, though I wouldn’t utterly exclude the possibility. I’m very doubtful NSA would outsource such a thing, though, for obvious security reasons. And they have a lot of storage.
“What is the procedure and safeguards of the NSA in blacking out names, and disposing of irrelevant data that is mined?”
Possibly imperfect on the first clause, given the known fact of raw material being given to John Bolton. I could only guess on the second, so I won’t. But there was a story I’d have to hunt for again a while ago about NSA purging data not long after the Bolton revelation stories on grounds of ex-post-facto concerns about maintaining the storage of said data on Americans.
DaveC: “According to Wikipedia….”
Would it be so much trouble to give a link, please?
“I think Jay Rockefeller is a representative of many Democrats who will work to harm the US’s security in order to score political points.”
What do you base that on, beyond Rush Limbaugh, and an unsourced alleged quote from a memo whose context we don’t know, but whose presented content is blatantly innocuous?
Why, if this is an accurate characterization of Senator Rockefellar, would you say that he didn’t leak his highly-damaging memo about the NSA “Program” prior to the NY Times and every other newspaper in America and the world publishing the relevant details, exactly, and his subsequent public release of that memo?
“Is it more important to hurt the Republicans, even if it compromises our nation’s security?”
Nope. Please provide some citations to back up a claim that Senator Rockefellar has, in fact, “compromise[ed] our nation’s security.”
“I think Jay Rockefeller is a representative of many Democrats who will work to harm the US’s security in order to score political points.”
That’s nice. Cites in support?
“Do I believe ABC radio when they never refer to this as anything but ‘domestic spying’? No.”
You’re asserting that U.S. citizens have not been listened to? Contradicted by presented evidence. You’ll have to argue with General Hayden about that fact, although I’m sure he’d be happy to agree with your phrasing preferences.
“The networks are oversimplifying this, and quite frankly lying to us.”
Cite?
Oh, and incidentally, DaveC, although I have no idea if you’ve read any of the dozen-plus posts I’ve written on the topic of the NSA “Program” since December, I’ve never once yet cited a tv or radio network source, so what you assert about them is utterly irrelevant to me, although if you have evidence of their “lying to us,” I’d certainly be quite interested.
I haven’t yet noticed a radio or tv network doing any original reporting on the topic, though. Maybe I’ve missed it. Maybe I’ve missed the fact that I’ve yet to see a single report that any other source has picked up from a tv or radio network. It’s always possible, although I’ve followed this issue fairly closely.
But until I see such cites and claims, it’s irrelevant to the known facts, so far as I can see, though, as I indicated, demonstrating said lying would most certainly be an important and interesting story.
I look forward to your citations in support of your allegations.
“Do I think that Democrats in general, and Jay Rockefeller really feel any responsibility for protecting Americans from terrorist attacks. No. They don’t care a bit.”
Lastly: I’m a “Democrat in general.” So is Hilzoy. So are a number of people here.
I invite you to possibly consider rephrasing.
Hmm. Do I think the program is a good idea, or do I think it is authorized by law? Substantively I’m not worried about a high false positive rate that gets corrected on further investigation–so long as the taps are used for counter-intelligence ONLY ONLY ONLY. This is once again why I don’t like treating terrorism under the ‘crime’ rubric. I think this kind of investigation is warranted but I don’t want it spreading into general operating procedure for all crimes.
Sebastian, I largely agree with that – but the prevention of mission creep is exactly why there needs to be oversight. And, stop me if you’ve heard this, if the exsisting regime does not allow for oversight of the program you want to run, go to congress and change the law. They were (and are) willing to accomodate reasoanble requests. According to Glenn G. this is a point Kennedy will try to make at the hearings.
For the life of me, I have yet to hear a cogent explanation of non-nefarious reasons why they had to either go outside of FISA or, (as Gary has suggested, repeatedly) get new laws passed if FISA was insufficient for the purposes of the technique or technology they wished to employ.
“Do I think the program is a good idea….”
That’s not a topic yet very debatable, since we still no relatively little about what the “the program” is, beyond leaked bits hither and yon.
Right now, the focus is on finding out what can be found out in a way that preserves necessary secrecy and doesn’t release information damaging to the genuine security interests of the United States, which pretty much everyone cares greatly about — certainly most people who live in the U.S. do, anyway — while still getting the members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees the necessary information to understand, and render judgment upon, “the Program,” and in an unclassified way, give We, The People, enough non-harmful information to have some kind of reasonable notion of what’s been going on in the name of “protecting” us.
Maybe I’d be 100% for it. And I repeat that I want this done in a way that doesn’t damage any genuine security interests.
But many of us also know enough history to know that the word of a President, any President, that we should simply Trust Him isn’t good enough. Not even a starter.
I’m afraid LBJ and Nixon, and then Reagan with Iran-Contra, put a stake through that notion forever. If we’re lucky. And fight hard. (Alternatively, say “the hell with liberty!; I surrender it for security!”)
Hell, include considering Bill Clinton a liar and perjurer, if you like, as relevant to the question of whether the President should not be answerable to Congress and the Courts. Consider whether you’d like President Hillary Clinton to not have to so answer when she, hypothetically, claims the right to commit whatever intelligence operation she likes that involves listening to and monitoring U.S. citizens and she insists she need not answer any questions Congress might have.
Great quote from Joe Klein this:
Read the account if you think I’m taking this out of context.
I thought of blogging this, and maybe I should and maybe I will. But meanwhile, Klein favors the program even though he doesn’t “yet know enough about it yet.” But he knows he favors it.
Meanwhile, while I’ve written many posts on the Program, I’ve said not one word on whether I “favor” or “oppose” it. It’s not a subject I could possibly address without far more information.
It’s making sure that whatever is done, is done legally, and not just on the whim and word of the Executive, that remains my only possible focus for now.
“I think this kind of investigation is warranted….”
Do you know something about it we don’t? What “kind of investigation” are you referring to? The one where General Hayden assured us that:
The one contradicted by Sunday’s Washington Post story?
Another story? The Administration has offered a variety of semi-contradictory stories. Which one would you like to point to as the one you consider most bedrock reliable, Sebastian?
Gary, correct me if I’m wrong, but s good idea doesn’t usually need a lot of lies told to sell it, right? That maxim seems to have some applicability here.
“Gary, correct me if I’m wrong, but s good idea doesn’t usually need a lot of lies told to sell it, right?”
I’m not sure that’s necessarily a question with a clear or falsifiable answer, and if there is, I don’t have it.
It’s certainly something I’d like to believe, and I work on that principle in my own behavior, but whether it’s an Absolute, or General, Truth, I’m not qualified to say.
Got two cents or more, Hilzoy?
I think Jay Rockefeller is a representative of many Democrats who will work to harm the US’s security in order to score political points. And I think that Sen Rockefeller is generally representative of his party as a whole.
i think DaveC is representative of many Republicans who will work to protect those who harm our civil liberties and system of justice in order to score political points.
DaveC:
How do you handle living in a country where roughly half of the citizens “will work to harm the US’s security in order to score political points”, as you say?
This is once again why I don’t like treating terrorism under the ‘crime’ rubric. I think this kind of investigation is warranted but I don’t want it spreading into general operating procedure for all crimes.
Of course the problem here is that the line between ‘crime’ and ‘terrorism’ isn’t always all that bright. Who can know without further investigation whether that string of robberies was undertaken to finance terror?
And of course you’ve got a solid slug of people williung to ascribe treasonous motives to the President’s political enemies — why, we such such a thing above — from which it’s a pretty small step to surveillance on domestic opponents. (Are there people in the goivernment more rabid than DaveC? You bet there are.)
On the false positive issue – There are two views of the discussion of false positives: First, that raising the realities of current technology to fight this program are is likely to be effective in garnering opposition. I believe this is true. Second, that the existence of large numbers of false positives is sufficient reason to declare the program unconctitutional. It is this second point I am wary of, because it seems to imply that if the false positive rate can be reduced below some threshold then it is OK for the government to sweep up all communication for electronic examination.
Given a system with a 50/50 or better split between false and true positives, I believe it is still wrong for the government to conduct the kind of massive information sweep that TIA represents. Arguing that a high false positive rate is sufficient to discredit the program is all well and good until the false positive rate starts to fall. Today, it may be 1%. With Moore’s law relentlessly marching along, and massive increases in the amount of information being collected about every one of us, that rate *will* fall, and there does not seem to me to be any fundamental reason for it to stop falling before the 50/50 point. When you cross-correlate credit card records, travel records, work records, educational records, records of contacts between individuals, purchasing patterns, reading habits, TV viewing habits, utilities use patterns etc., you can build up a pretty damn clear picture of an individual. It’s not possible yet, but there’s no reason to suppose it won’t be possible in the future.
I submit that the loss of privacy inherent in even an effective TIA program is sufficiently serious an infringement of my rights that it should be forbidden, even if it means a lower probability of catching terrorists.
“I submit that the loss of privacy inherent in even an effective TIA program is sufficiently serious an infringement of my rights that it should be forbidden, even if it means a lower probability of catching terrorists.”
The question arises a bit further down the road with private endeavors of the same nature. Assuming arguendo that we make it illegal for the government to do such TIA, or at least place strict controls and accountability on it, what do we do when such computing power and at least somewhat comparable data-access becomes available in private hands, to large corporations, or ultimately even to individuals to some extent?
How do we deal with that, which is inevitably coming down the road aways? Do we pass laws authorizing checks of all private computing systems, in twenty or forty years from now, to make sure such TIA programs aren’t running? Do we just learn to live with it?
Not an immediate problem. But not one that will stay that way forever. (Ditto other coming gains in technology in privacy intrusion. Eventually, “smart surveillance clouds,” and other nanotech. This will happen long before any possible “Singularity.”)
Togolosh, I would expect evolution in evasion technology as well. And a large increase in global traffic, greatly complicating surveillance. I’m rather skeptical that trained, careful people will be unable to communicate safely because of this sort of system.
Rilkefan, are we only worried about the rights of “trained, careful people”? And it’s about more than communication — it’s about having all your purchases, movements, and other actions tracked. Perhaps some of that is less objectionable than listening in on communications, but it seems that if such tradeoffs are going to be made the public needs to know what’s going on and ultimately needs to be making the decisions.
KC, I wasn’t talking about the rights of citizens, but about the tactics of terrorists. The question was about the expected false positive rate as a function of computing power.
I am dubious that the false positive rate can be reduced significantly, technology improvements notwithstanding.
Technology improvements only matter if you have an algorithm that works, but is impractical due to lack of computing power. Lacking such an algorithm, Moore’s Law, quantum computers, etc., aren’t going to help.
It seems to have taken a lot of human effort to get the 5000 down to fewer than ten, not all of whom are necessarily valid “hits.” Assuming that this effort, and the judgments involved, can be automated, is a very big leap.
togolosh: one of the other benefits of the false positive argument is that it makes it fairly easy to show that the error rates needed to pass constitutional muster would be unimaginably difficult, unless terrorists were so common that we’d be toast already. (I mean, if, say, 20% of the US population were terrorists bent on destroying this country, we’d be in trouble too deep for surveillance to fix.)
“(I mean, if, say, 20% of the US population were terrorists bent on destroying this country, we’d be in trouble too deep for surveillance to fix.)”
But…but…but! Steve Green and a bazillion other right-wing bloggers assure me that we are at War with the Whole Moslem World! And we must “really piss them off”!
There are well over 9,000,000 Muslims in the US alone. We’d better get to work right away on the whole “pissing them off” thing, and then we’ll have all the terrorists we need!
I mean, all those bloggers taking this line couldn’t be wrong, could they?
Please, I couldn’t take the shock.
I had meant to add that I realize that that figure is only 3.5% of the U.S. population, but, still, it’s a good start, don’t you think?
Gary, you’re not trying very hard. Clearly Democrats are terrorist sympathizers — even DaveC comes close to saying it — so that’ll get you well over the 20% mark.
Right, I keep forgetting that “…many Democrats who will work to harm the US’s security in order to score political points. And I think that Sen Rockefeller is generally representative of his party as a whole” and “…Do I think that Democrats in general, and Jay Rockefeller really feel any responsibility for protecting Americans from terrorist attacks. No. They don’t care a bit. Democrats leaders don’t want to take the precautions necessary to keep America from being hit by terrorist attacks again….”
I keep forgetting. Blow me up, terrorists! I enjoyed having the buildings I once worked in, and once lived in walking distance of, collapse and kill thousands! I’m glad friends of mine couldn’t return to their homes in the neighborhood for months! I’m glad friends and relatives of theirs were killed!
Because I’m a Democrat, and I Just Don’t Care!
So, yeah, some 47% of the country is suicidal.
I keep forgetting.
I do hope DaveC will support his accusations with evidence and citations soon. I’d hate to think he’d make wildly offensive charges that weren’t supportable. I’m tentatively assuming he fell and hit his head that night, or something, because he seems like a good guy, usually, and so he must have been off his feed when he posted that, I assume. Been there, done that, myself, in other ways at other times.
Steve Green links to my post here, by the way. He also sent an amiable e-mail daring to say he welcomed civil disagreement!
The cad!
I sent him an amiable response, explaining among other things, that I picked him because I figured it was unlikely he’d go ballastic, and if that unlikely event occurred, at least it would be well-written and likely entertaining.
But he called me a “gentleman”! This is outrageous!
Wrong thread, really. Oops.
Occasionally after an exceptionally heavy meal, I feel that I am “going ballastic.” Is that the same thing, Gary?
It is when I’m sleepy enough.
But don’t go overboard with the notion.
I do hope DaveC will support his accusations with evidence and citations soon. I’d hate to think he’d make wildly offensive charges that weren’t supportable. I’m tentatively assuming he fell and hit his head that night, or something
Actually I posted that pretty soon before I went to bed, and my thoughts probably are better expressed by this post by Jeff Goldstein.
Yes, I shouldn’t have said “Democrats in general”, but “Senate Democrats in general”, which would have made my comment make more sense, even though you would still stongly disagree with that assertion (and would still want all sorts of evidence). Sorry, my bad.
But that is my perception of the issue, right or wrong, and the “domestic spying” shorthand used all over the radio and TV news is meant to make people have a different perception.
“But that is my perception of the issue, right or wrong, and the “domestic spying” shorthand used all over the radio and TV news is meant to make people have a different perception.”
Dave, are you going to offer any further support and citations in support of your accusations and charges, or is this going to be it?
I’m pretty busy with other things and am a slow writer, so it may be a day or two.
“I’m pretty busy with other things and am a slow writer, so it may be a day or two.”
Okay. Just so it’s coming.