Ethics Aside, Is NSA's Spy Tool Efficient?

Think about the heterogeneity of the data, the lack of structure, and the unpredictable nature of its generation. Frankly, I have no doubt that the NSA is not monitoring phone chatter on a mass scale, probably not because they can't, but because if they did there would be no way in hell to parse, store, process and evaluate the data generated.

We (the scientific/big data community) can barely get recommendation engines working well - engines which have one set of data (what you watched) and do one other thing (suggest what else you might want to watch). Unless the NSA is decades ahead in a number of fields (like data warehousing, statistical analysis of massive datasets, machine learning) how are they getting useful information in a systematic way, considering the pressure from the data-firehouse involved?

My guess is they're probably not - instead the data are collected, and then used in conjunction with traditional approaches. e.g. little johnny buys some fertilizer and one way plane ticket - so who's he been talking to, what's he been saying, etc.

Honestly, how the NSA is using/dealing with/storing/accessing these data is actually an incredibly interesting question, from an academic/systems perspective.

Efficiency is a red herring. Ethics ends up just two sides saying "I'm right you're wrong". The only meaningful question is "Is the government fulfilling its role as government?". Or the simpler proxy question: "Is this constitutional?".

Ethics talk is opinion because obviously the people doing it and their supporters think it's ethical. If you tell them you think it's unethical they'll disagree and discount the rest of what you say. Two groups just saying "I'm right and you're wrong" or "I'm ethical and you're unethical" ends up with the more powerful one getting what they want.

Even if, say, torture efficiently got information, if it also galvanized the world against you, provoked many suicide bombers, got your own people tortured, lowered the population's trust and faith in the government, distanced your allies, increased the costs of maintaining the military, and so on, it might not be worth it.

If you put the entire population in jail, you will have 100% efficiency in jailing criminals. But what cost? The point is that if the government doesn't protect freedom or represent the will of the people then it will lose popular support and have to support itself by convincing people lack of freedom is preferable to freedom or just lying.

Besides, it didn't stop the Boston Marathon Bombing.

Like say for example, you catch a terrorist but he won't tell you anything and you suspect they were not acting alone.

So, maybe you interview the guy's brother who insists he knows nothing , hasn't seen his brother for 5 years and loves America.

So you check the brother out with PRISM and find that: He had an IM conversation with someone in 2002 and he spoke about how happy he was that 9/11 happened.

Someone had taken and uploaded a photo to a social network of the brothers at the same place 2 years ago.

You decide that putting covert surveillance on the brother might not be a waste of resources.

So either they know it's ineffective and do it anyway, because they can. More money, more power, more influence.

Or it's not being used to generate leads, but as a way to look up retrospectively what people have done online once they become of interest from tip-offs and traditional investigations.

The slides were written as if morons were the audience. It uses brightly colored bubbles to define the very few key points involved. In any other bureaucracy, these slides would be seen as yet another example of office workers having to be reminded to do their "TPS reports". The slides, more or less read as: "Hey dumbfucks, remember that we have two systems for espionage. PLEASE remember to use BOTH of them"

The fact that they took the time to come up with a memorable name like PRISM is also kind of amusing, like the way politicians come up with PATRIOT Act and PROTECT-IP to help people remember what hot-button issue they involve.

edit: In addition to this, Snowden managed to get the files using a USB key, something which had been banned years before at the NSA because someone was able to infect NSA's infrastructure with such a device...and yet Snowden was still able to steal files...at the very least, the NSA's IT logistics doesn't seem to be much better than of large corporations: http://theweek.com/article/index/245643/how-edward-snowden-s...

So the NSA may employ the world's best engineers and mathematicians, but it doesn't necessarily mean things are well-honed and efficient.

What a world we live in! :(

But no, it isn't, because it can be gamed like any other rules system. The NSA probably thinks their system hasn't been explored yet, relying as they do primarily on security through obfuscation.

One of the greatest pleasures in life is examining "black box" systems and figuring them out. The NSA would be fools to expect that their system is not already being gamed.

IMO the last quote in this article is the perfect response to the quandaries raised by the rest of the article:

Any automated approach or data analysis is sure to raise false positives - but what other options are there? Zero data analysis or automation? Pure human "police" or "detective work" raises false positives as well.

If they're looking for patterns similar to those of historical terrorists, then their false positive rate is likely reasonably low considering the scale of their data set.

If they're looking for patterns or traits of hypothetical terrorist behavior, that's another story.

Systems-based trading in the financial sector comes to mind. Constructing a trading system that performs well when tested against historical data is easy. Constructing a system that performs well on future data isn't.

The solution to the latter usually involves using more generalized indicators when building the system to avoid the pitfall of curve-fitting your system to the data.

In this case though, it might just mean more false positives to sift through.

How could one distinguish between a terrorist cell and another small group of people intensely working on something, like a startup?