I once had the pleasure of watching one use nothing but twitter posts to map out all the gang territories of Chicago. While he was at it, he found evidence in a murder case and found a picture someone posted of themselves holding an RPG in the city. If I remember correctly, he'd put all of this together in 3 days.
Of course, he was independent and so had to rely on the publicly available twitter searches, where the expectation is that tweets are public. The good - and terrible - things that could be done with access to what people expect to be private is a far more challenging prospect to justify.
And, I think that is a debate worth having. However, it is certainly a forgone conclusion that the programs can and do contribute to stopping bad actors.
No... it’s not a forgone conclusion, that’s the very point up for debate. That’s a massive claim made without commensurate evidence, and you’re responding to someone specifically making that point!
The far more interesting and valuable debate to my mind is the extent to which we, the civilian government, should enable the policing and military powers to use the tools, and at what cost to ourselves.
Beyond that, for the debate you want to have (a good one I think) all parties need more information. I can’t judge the efficacy of a system without dats on its past. Maybe the inherent asymmetry in information between TLA’s and the public makes this impossible in all cases, but not to the extent we currently live with.
It's a bit of a catch-22. Discussing the effectiveness of one strategy versus another could easily lead to bad actors changing their communication strategies to avoid what is currently effective. It is, in that regard, not much different than the reason why we don't compare the effectiveness of various secret agents and spies and their techniques in public forums; if we know, so too do others. The very effectiveness relies, in part, in not being part of public knowledge.
Finally, I think one point (perhaps the most important in this regard) that you didn't address is that these tools aren't necessarily allowing anyone to do anything new, assuming they had the data in the first place. They've taken what intel analysts were previously doing by hand for many years and automating gathering the data and generating views into it. Both of those save a significant amount of time, but I have yet to see a system that generates something that a human:
a) didn't need to verify first by inspecting the source data to confirm, and
b) couldn't have come up with given time to do the job by hand
The products themselves are only novel in their packaging. The amount of analyses that can be performed has also increased due to the broader array of data that can be ingested, but again, that in itself is only a matter of scale, not novelty.
So if we're talking about using these things for national security, that's one thing in the minds of the critics. (The reasonable critics anyway.) But if we're talking about giving it to every joe blow cop on the street, people are going to be, understandably, uncomfortable. Why? Because I always say, there are hundreds of thousands of laws and regulations in this nation. There really is no way a regular person can guarantee that they are in compliance with every one of them at all times. So if we're going to, sort of, "automate" the discovery of which crime any given citizen is committing, people can kind of see where that might lead to a dark, dark place.
Or, long story short, most people, quite reasonably, believe that tech like this deployed against street level pot dealers will eventually be used against themselves. With all of the societal implications that entails.
Like any tool, it's not inherently good or bad. That means that we should give it extra scrutiny, because the more powerful it is, the more prone to abuse it could be.
PowerPoint actually did come into play - its how he presented his analysis to clients who hired him directly tather than buy access to the tool itself.