Giving the F.B.I. What It Wants
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
This man is hopelessly naive about modern computer technology. Keeping track of 300 million people is not quite trivial (yet) but well within the means of the FBI at its current staffing and funding levels. Worse -- much worse -- is that data mining is virtually certain to result in very convincing looking false positives.
This is why it is unwise to take legal advice from performance artists.
But, on the positive side, you are totally right that he is completely naive about data mining technology.
The reason is that people are the asymptotic bottleneck. If computers totally and automatically understood everything, then the dominating term would be compute time. But it's not. The dominating term is clearly people, who must ultimately review the truly promising information. Maybe the compute resources make this linear relationship hold over lower constants, but it is still definitely linear. And any technological advantage is unfortunately shortchanged by the constant factor of red tape.
Ex-Googlers like Ron here no doubt have a different view on what can/should be done to monitor people, but I argue that this is irrelevant to the government. And even if they agreed with them in principle, there's enough red tape that a system like what they have in mind would just never be realistic.
If you're going to be surprised, it's best for it to be pleasant.
Now who has the burden of proof?
> who must ultimately review the truly promising information.
You could make the same argument for e.g. the stock market. Program trading can never become a dominant force in the market because humans must ultimately make all the decisions (like what programs to run). The flaw in this reasoning should be self-evident.
> this is irrelevant to the government [because of] red tape
You put too much faith in red tape. You may not have noticed, but since 9/11 there has arisen a shadow government that is not subject to normal bureaucratic constraints, or indeed even to the rule of law. See e.g. http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/
I cannot emphasize this enough: you have the burden of proof, and so far you have completely failed to live up to it.
EDIT: Though, to clarify, I do agree that we don't need 300 million people to monitor 300 million people. That's not the part I'm contesting.
What very strong claims are you referring to? I have only made two claims:
1) The FBI is easily capable of doing the data processing to monitor 300M people, and so flooding it with data is not an effective defense against being monitored. Facebook monitors 500M+ people. Do you seriously doubt that the FBI couldn't?
2) Data mining the information from 300M people is virtually certain to lead to false positives. Proving this is an elementary exercise in probability theory. The details are left as an exercise.
When they have a lead or reason to find something about you, e.g. you work for the minority party or are an actual dissident or slept with a cop's ex-wife, they comb through everything and find something you did that may not even be illegal but would be embarrassing.
No humans need to be involved in storing the voice data on tape, and automatic transcription and cross-indexing only ever needs to be performed for a few phone numbers which are under investigation. But once someone becomes a suspect, all his history can be played back in order to, for example, discover his accomplices.
There are scenarios which demonstrate how this can be useful and can save lives. I imagine these scenarios were used by the fascists to get the government to allow this. It goes like this: In a system in which wiretapping is only allowed by court order after law enforcement has probable cause, wiretapping a suspect's phone could be too late - he's either dead (law enforcement first got interested in him after discovering his body) or learned enough to not talk about his activity on the phone. But back when he was getting started he made mistakes. With conversations recorded before law enforcement ever heard of him, those mistakes can be exploited.
This is already done to a limited extent. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Enough false positives will drop the signal/noise ratio.
The way it works is you will never be cleared, the security-theater machine has "eaten" you.
You can only give them more reasons to collect evidence on petty crimes, their original motivation for stalking you, even if your file was flagged accidentally, is long lost.
With half a million names on the "Terrorist Watch List", once they have ways to automate this (ala nationwide facial recognition and domestic drones) you will be stalked for the rest of your life by the government. You'll be 80 years old and they will have terabytes on you for absolutely no reason. But if you even accidentally commit a petty crime, they will happily share the info with local cops to hassle you more.
Here is his wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasan_M._Elahi
The feds probably won't harass him directly anymore, but he now has the joy to document how the automated security-theater system will wrong him for the next 50+ years.
Just like during the Iraq war people turned in their neighbors and people they didn't like in general for the bounties and many of them ended up in gitmo - but now the innocent ones can supposedly never be released because they most certainly have become embittered and dangerous. Oh yeah, remember Gitmo? Still there.
In other words, being on a security watch list is like being diagnosed with cancer. You're never cured. The symptoms are just in remission and can resurface at any time.
Federal law enforcement only cares about petty crimes when they can lead to stopping major crimes. If they think you have information they want, they'll hold the maximum penalty for anything you do over your head until they get it. But they have no reason to harass someone who isn't involved in major criminal or subversive activity.
Being on a watch list sucks and it's going to cause this guy inconvenience for life, for whatever he does. But federal agents tend to be intelligent and driven people. They aren't any more likely to waste time harassing a stranger than you are.
The fact is, we violate laws every day. In addition to actual violations, we do many more things that look suspicious and can be construed as potential violations. The government doesn't have to convict you in order to radically lower your quality of life. It merely has to investigate you.
For example, I knew a person that protested against the RNC convention in 2008. Though they were protesting peacefully, their group was broken up and arrested by the FBI. For the next two years, their case was bounced down from federal court to state courts, and then from state courts to county courts. Two and a half years later, the case was dismissed without any explanation or apology. However, while the case was ongoing, this person was unable to get a job, unable to get housing, unable to do anything that would require a background check or a credit check.
Was this person involved in major criminal or subversive activity? I don't see how she could have been, given that all charges were dropped. However, the actions taken against her can only be described as harassment.
You've polled every single federal and state employee, as well as various contractors?
Sadly that's far from unusual. Meek compliance is how most people (myself included) tend to behave when confronted by federal or state agencies, regardless of how their privacy is being invaded.
If more people raised a stink, the number of US citizens subjected to such a thing would rapidly drop. People would not be dragged from airplanes or into questioning at the slightest hint of suspicion from highly questionable sources. You want to see what's in my storage unit? No problem, go get a warrant. As an aside - if the author was mistaken about its contents they just lied to a federal agent which itself is a crime, regardless of any original innocence).
The sad thing is, as a system and individually they probably think they are helping a great deal. They are investigating and taking things seriously, they are protecting our country against pervasive and extremely dangerous terrorists. I bet most of them have brainwashed (and that includes brainwashing themselves) into thinking that.
They are making enemies but they don't see that, to them enemies just appear, spawned out of pure 'hatred of our freedoms'. The more they see this kind of antagonism, the harder they investigate everyone, the most they investigate, the more antagonism they generate.
Women are on average physically weaker than men.
African-americans are on average of lower intelligence than asian-americans.
I note that he's an artist, not a computer scientist, and that he may be blissfully unaware of the amount of computing and programming power available to government.
He does have a good point when he mentions that monitoring good guys means more false positives and more missed opportunities to monitor bad guys.
And he does make a good point in the last few paragraphs; privacy advocates are horrified by some of the things happening at Google / Facebook / Twitter / etc; but these services are very very popular. Why do people give up these freedoms so willingly?
I don't think it's accurate to word it that way. Allowing some information about oneself to become public is more an issue of personal privacy than about freedom.
Now, if the government decides to use that now public information to detain or otherwise strip the freedom from that individual, that's another far more frightful issue.
I think that most people tend to post updates on Facebook/Twitter because they don't consider it private. Everyone I know knows that I'm married and to whom, so I don't worry about posting that on Facebook. People are often worried about online privacy, but I would bet that most people are pretty open with friends and family in in-person situations.
Now if a site like Facebook is taking data that I intend to keep private and turning that into public data, that's also a different, and far more important, issue.
Or maybe I've just watched too many spy movies.
...Or maybe I've also just watched too many spy movies.
“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him” Cardinal Richelieu
The valuable data here is the personal data of the FBI interrogators , yeah we have nothing to hide but you (government, or power structures) have not either.
In real life you don't give your private information to stalkers that don't want to give theirs.
I hope he understands he is advocating a DDoS attack on FBI's information collection departments ;-)
I hope this insanity ends someday, but it's not really a very rational expectation. Once paranoia sets in, it's hard to cure. It's costing us (mankind - I am neither a US citizen nor live in the US) resources that could be better employed. I am sure the FBI folks would prefer to spend their time investigating actual crimes instead of shadows. But, again, once you start believing every shadow is your enemy, it's very hard to act rationally.
Instilling fear is the goal of the terrorists they try to fight. As far as I can see, they won. Long ago.
:-(
People are paid for doing work. The fact that they did work is measured i.e. by the number of cases 'solved'. Would you rather get paid more ('solve' many cases) or less (go for difficult do solve actual cases)? People have to sustain their families etc.
A friend of mine summed it up pretty good. " 'Police' don't catch people they should catch, they catch those they _can_ catch."
The author was lucky not having had ties with the wrong political party or some other US opposition group.
The author makes an important point earlier in the article and here contradicts himself: he says that he intentionally presents the information in a disorganized way. This is a problem that Facebook and social networks in general solve. So don't think that because everyone has a Facebook and is therefore flooding the market with information about them it's no longer useful to intelligence gatherers be them governmental or private interests. That's actually the problem of a platform like Facebook where privacy is concerned.
-you can manipulate the stream of information and send false information, they will still check it and they will always do if they think it is necessary, you will never be trusted by them not even if all things you sent them are true.
-It is quite a hassle to keep all this information and to send it out. It would be easier to just let them investigate it themselves.
Also, in the future we could have sophisticated computer systems that could analyze data if everybody started revealing everything. His solution of revealing everything may not necessarily be a long term solution.