Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal • Hacker News Board

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#201

Post by barking » Mon, Dec 17, 2012, 9:27 PM UTC

jlgreco wrote: post #172

barking wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your extreme example you can see that people in the B' group (those who don't have black hair) can be safely excluded as suspects. So even in this artificial example you can see that knowing P(B|A) is of value.

You seem to have missed the part where the extreme example is not real life. If you exclude people without black hair from suspicion, then the baddies will find someone without black hair. You cannot assume P(B|A) will not be modified by the policies you adopt. ...well, you can if you are the TSA and don't actually have to answer to anybody.... P(B|A) will never be 100% anyway though, so even if the terrorists were u…

You seem to have missed the part where the extreme example is not real life Actually, I referred to your example as both 'extreme' and 'artificial' in my previous post. Since the example was constructed to make your point as obvious as possible I was just pointing out that in fact P(B|A) was actually useful even in that example.

Sorry for the delay in responding, I gave up yesterday because there was no option to reply even after a very long time.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#202

Post by Vivtek » Mon, Dec 17, 2012, 9:32 PM UTC

pyre wrote: post #199

Vivtek wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the biographer also had a clearance. They were actually within their rights. Whether it was a gainful use of resources given the origin of the tip is dubious, but they weren't actually violating the judicial oversight requirement, as far as I understand it.

They didn't know who it was connected to at all before getting information from Google. Claiming that they both had clearances, and gave up a right to private email is trying to forgive these things after the fact. Unknown individuals should be assumed to have privacy rights. You can't break into someone random person's house, then find out that they committed a crime, and say that the warrant-less search was now a-o…

I'm pretty sure (but I don't know absolutely) that the fact that she had clearance means, effectively, that the breach of privacy was her transgression, not the government's. It's effectively as though the police have a warrant to search your house - any conversation with a person with clearance is subject to surveillance, and if they screw it up, that's no protection of your privacy.

Re: Massive New Surveillance Program Uncovered by Wall Street Journal

#203

Post by yid » Wed, Dec 19, 2012, 12:15 AM UTC

varelse wrote: post #144

yid wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you might be a bit too wrapped up in conspiracy theories, friend.