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Comment by chmike | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the critics. Do you think that terrorists or criminals are detected by oracles ? You ridiculed the security agencies after 911 for not beeing able to detect such a plot and now you are in shock because they do their job ? There is no way to detect a plot while staying eyes shut.

There is a problem, more precisely a risk, but it is not in collecting the data and processing it to detect a plot. It is in the usage and control of usage of the data. This is the heart of the problem and the secrecy around this information gathering and processing is not a good sign. Who controlls and how is this information controlled are the core problem which is absolutely not properly addressed.

The need to collect the information to ensure security is on the other hand obvious, at least to me. Not doing this is stupid.

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Ok, you're my target cause this comment is so obviously being uttered by someone who hasn't studied history in his/her whole life... Jeez ! (whom i don't believe in btw)

Hacker new indeed....

Has anyone's been following dunno, wikileaks or Appelbaum or... Hacker news that are not on hackernews (which usurpates its name because what it really is is startup news) ? Eagle, the Athen Affair (http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/security/the-athens-affair/...), or more generally this : http://wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html ?

It's our liberty that's slipping out of the (gaping a..)hole of democracies, which is not democracies fault because they are by definition are "representative governements", based on election. Tocqueville knew that back in the XIXth, so did all theoreticians of "governance", and not a single one called a "representative government" a "democracy".

Anyway. What it boils down to is : if you're not strictly speaking living in a democracy (which i'm sorry, the US, UK, France,... Aren't by historical, philosophical, and semantic definition), the only thing that matters is keeping power at bay. Try and elect representatives who truly understand that too much power in to few hands always leads to disaster. Only. There are none. There haven't been for decades. The latest in france was General de Gaulle (though his ego was high, he was the sort able to step down from power after a people's vote) , and I guess, on the US side, Kennedy.

I wouldn't trust my shoes to the state. And to facebook ? (non existing) Jeez again ! This is so scary to realize nobody - at large - realizes...

WWII is far away, the days of the cold war too, and people become lazy. Even (so called) hackers.

I fear people are confusing things. Take the analogy of police patrols in streets. They may see all what you do and even control your identity and ask you questions. You may consider this as a frontal aggression to your privacy and right to move around without beeing spied. You may claim it's the same as the gestapo, or your preferred historical reference. It wouldn't be fully wrong.

But see that it has also been understood by your ancestors that it is a price to pay to ensure security of the people. Because while they look at what you do they also look at what bad people do and will detect them most of the time.

The same change is taking place at a country and hopefuly at a world scale by using the new tools available.

Now back to the police patrols. While this has a proven positive effect on ssecurity, this is also a risk because these armed forces walking among us may also be subverted and they may abuse people. This is a real danger and by society evolution and learning mechanisms and rules have been put in place to avoid this.

All I say is that police patrols are unavoidable and needed to ensure security. Our concern should be to focus on the mechanisms and rules put in place to ensure it doesn't go wrong, gets misused or abused.

So I think we agree that there is indeed a danger with this. We may disagree on what the danger is and what we should focus on. This is in par with democracy.

Police patrols are not one thing. It is not just "officer friendly" with a nightstick. In New York City, there are paramilitary teams wandering around in subway stations -- one can only recognize them as police because of the word POLICE written on their body armor.

Things have gotten excessive:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/06/cops-military-gear/a...

Yup. There has to be some sort of control in any system (even a few anarchists agree on that).

To further your/my/our point(s), you can read Bruce Schneier's latest "Crypto-Gram Newsletter" (https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-1212.html). He rephrases the problem with a feudal/serf paradygm, which is quite appropriate imo.

When innocent until proven guilty is removed (folks are presumed to do something that breaks the law in the future by this) we are heading down the wrong path. Many might say, "If you aren't doing anything wrong then you have nothing to worry about". Except we don't know what is considered "wrong" so everyone has everything to worry about. "But we're a democracy so we don't have to worry about losing control!" others will say. I will point you to the wonderful "democratic" elections that are held in North Korea... that is the society and structure you get when utilizing "thought crimes and thought police".

I don't necessarily disagree, it doesn't bother me nearly as much as it does a lot of people on here. However, we had actionable intelligence about 9-11 well in advance of the attacks, and yet there were simply too many threats for us to identify this one as plausible. On the one hand this was failure of analysis. On the other hand, as the 9-11 commission concluded, there was a failure of imagination: for some reason no one took this type of threat that seriously, even though similar scenarios had been proposed by analysts before.

My question, then, is how are orders of magnitude more data going to help? I honestly think it will make our predictive power worse, not better, at least for decades to come until we have learned enough to start making sense of data on the scale we are talking about here.

It is really just a case of doing it because our technology will allow it, and a general hand-waving of "more is better" and "it will make everyone safer", than facing the reality of actually detecting a terrorist threat.

It is, in fact, just more security theater.

Target knows you're pregnant, Facebook knows you're gay, now the government is working on knowing if you're a terrorist.

Big data isn't the future, its today.

Didn't 9/11 seem more human mistake, power battle and inefficiencies between organizations rather than lack of intelligence data ?

Yes. Intelligence and law enforcement had all the information they needed to stop the hijackers, but were unable to properly correlate it. Since then we've added a flood of low-quality data via mass surveillance which probably makes their jobs even harder by vastly increasing the number of false positives.

And then the Latin Kings or the 14K or the Camorra get their hands on the data. Then you're screwed.

(Of course that's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky, it's the Russian FSB or Chinese PSB).

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