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Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

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Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#141

Post by orangecat »

rglover wrote: post #97

Are we so spooked as a nation that we're really considering precognition-style crime fighting? Liberties aside, this really makes me wonder what the atmosphere is like inside the government. With all of this paranoia, only two paths come to mind: 1.) They're aware of a future threat so large that it threatens the stability of the country, or 2.) They're planning something internally to "take over" the country one way…

With all of this paranoia, only two paths come to mind

I think it's just that they place zero or negative value on privacy, so any perceived incremental increase in identifying threats justifies any amount of increased surveillance.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#142

Post by orangecat »

conradfr wrote: post #49
chmike wrote: post #17

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…

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.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#143

Post by pcvarmint »

pcvarmint wrote: post #11

Nothing new, move on :(

Not sure why this was downvoted, but those of us who have been reading Naomi Wolf, Glenn Greenwald, et al. have known about this. This is merely the logical extension of the Patriot Act, Military Commissions Act, Telecom Immunity, NDAA, etc. I hope this federal Leviathan collapses, and we return to liberty someday, but I fear there will be a lot of casualties before that happens.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#144

Post by varelse »

yid wrote: post #139
varelse wrote: post #137

Since the predictive algorithms in use mostly come down to glorified dot products, I question their general validity. Sure, it works sometimes, but just look at some of the wacky stuff Amazon, Google, and Netflix derive from such things. Now replace search results and product recommendations with waterboarding and extraordinary rendition based on the results of those dot products and hilarity ensues...

And those dot products come down to glorified FMUL and FADD machine instructions! Specious reductionism goes all the way down.

And those FMUL and FADD instructions could either be fused multiply/add or separate multiplies and adds with twice the truncation issues, Holy FPRE!

But I'm curious as to why you place such faith in the sooper top sekrit(tm) basis vectors for these dot products? It seems to me that it's politically expedient for such a system to generate false positives rather than risk letting the terrorists win(tm) and that's where I think things go wrong. Because it would appear from the outside that the powers-that-be have decreed that it's better to torture the occasional innocent than risk letting the guilty slip through their fingers.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#145

Post by d0ne »

My company will sponsor $5,000 for the best idea submission for mitigation techniques against these types of systems. Any suggestion on the best service to use host this / receive submissions?

We will:

1) Open source all submitted ideas.

2) Let the community choose the top 5 and we will hold an internal review process for the top spot.

3) Fly the winner(s) to our office in Atlanta, GA to discuss the winning submission in details with some of the top information security experts in the world.

4) Work to get press around the winning idea.

5) If we get north of 50 submissions we will help seed (with an additional $5,000) an IndieGoGo campaign to see the idea developed.

Email me (adam | socialfortress.com) or respond here to discuss.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#146

Post by AutoKorrect »

ladies and gentlemen we have here a clear case where the people in charge have failed to uphold the Constitution of the United States. These people must be forced out of government, and prosecuted for their crimes.

Please vote, and please run for office if you have the fortitude to help us deal with this problem.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#148

Post by jlgreco »

barking wrote: post #112
jlgreco wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.....and, where the cost of false positives is sufficiently high and the rate of false positives is sufficiently high, that is a very relevant consideration that is in fact made by the medical community. That is just a basic of modern medicine. The world is not black and white. These are things that must be weighed and considered rationally with real data, not emotionally with fabricated absolutes. You don't get to d…

I'm sorry but you have gone off on a tangent there. We weren't arguing about the effectiveness of the policy just the rationale behind it, I believe. I don't have any stats on that, do you?

A rationale that includes P(B|A) but not P(A|B) is not a rational one. I have been asking you to evaluate the legitimacy of the rationale by considering P(A|B).

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#149

Post by pstuart »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #116

Why I'm worried about a surveillance state? Because the people in charge will have their records protected while everyone else gets the surveillance. Our president committed crimes his justice department jails people for (illegal drugs). Drug testing is a perfect example of the surveillance state. The people who don't get tested? The testers. The legislators. The people in charge. I know there are technical problems…

They need to lead by example. After all, what do they have to hide?

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#150

Post by joshuahedlund »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #116

Why I'm worried about a surveillance state? Because the people in charge will have their records protected while everyone else gets the surveillance. Our president committed crimes his justice department jails people for (illegal drugs). Drug testing is a perfect example of the surveillance state. The people who don't get tested? The testers. The legislators. The people in charge. I know there are technical problems…

This is a good point, although as we saw most recently with Petraeus, sometimes an expansive surveillance state can't help but ensnare its own leaders, and this often accidentally leads to its limitations (as a bill requiring warrants for emails is now making its way through the Senate)
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