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Comment by Chardok | Hacker News Reader

He states it in the video: they are incredibly overwhelmed with data coming in and are just using "old search methods" such as word search that he deems ineffective.

My understanding is that this bulk data gathering is not as much as preventing attacks but further securing of power for the strange amalgamation that we would call the federal government.

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Even if they cared, they wouldn't risk burning a source/method over a couple of teenagers potentially harming themselves or each other. This apparatus isn't about helping police, it's about state control, ostensibly of things like immigration and terrorism, but realistically as you say it's pure power.

That was years ago - By now, I'm sure they run it all through deep networks and ought to easily be able to "search by thought" - for example, "find all people who have considered or ever talked about blowing up something in a non sarcastic way".

Neural networks, with enough training data (which the NSA surely possesses), and enough compute power (which the NSA also possesses), could easily do this.

Having left his job more than 15 years ago, is there any chance that he's simply not aware of the actual methods they're using?

I know in other fields the ability to do concept searching (via LSI and other techniques), rather than simple text based searching, has been in use for many years. His example/problem of a search for "bomb" bringing up noise (such as an email talking about a QB throwing a 'bomb' pass) should have long ago been solved.

It's odd reading about this on HN.. Paul Graham sprading bayesian flagging long ago. One thing though... money isn't everything; I can imagine NSA employees being blindsighted by their own resources and keep using a hammer to kill a fly.

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