This Ars Technica piece makes the argument about the ineffectiveness of mass surveillance at catching terrorists.
Just imagine, for a moment, that 0.1% of all the calls that go through this system score hits. Now let's suppose the system processes 2 million calls a day. That's still 2,000 calls a day that the feds will want to eavesdrop on—a very high number, and still much higher than any courts could possibly oversee. Furthermore, only a miniscule fraction of the overall total of 2 million calls per day on only a few days of each month will contain any information of genuine interest to the feds, and the odds that some of those calls will be among those that catch the governments interest are passing slim.
Targeted human intelligence has always been and will always be the best way to sort the sharks from the guppies (to change fish metaphors). Government money invested in much less intrusive and much less defense contractor-friendly programs like training more Arabists and developing more "human assets" in the field will be orders of magnitude more effective than mass surveillance could ever be. Blunt instruments like airport facial recognition software and random subway bag searches produce much more noise than they do signal, and any engineer or computer scientist worth his or her salt will tell you that an intelligent, targeted, low-tech approach beats a brute-force high-tech approach every time."
When you're looking for a needle in a haystack, the number of false positives is going to be enormous. Sifting through these low-quality false positives can overwhelm legitimate law enforcement resources to pursue high quality leads.
Posted by alevin at December 23, 2005 09:18 PM | TrackBack