Briefly, given the ratio of non-terrorists to terrorists, you couldn't make such programs accurate enough to catch actual terrorists without also catching so many non-terrorists (say, millions) as to render the whole thing pointless.
Which is unfortunate in a way, because it sounds nice to just say that if we set the computers loose on all of our phone records and internet activity and credit card purchases and travel history and library use, they'd be able to handily separate the nasty, plotting wheat from the inoffensive, law-abiding chaff.*
But if we give up all that privacy and get in exchange a decent chance of winning the Next Sack of Terror Flour lottery, it no longer seems like such a good deal. The numbers do not appear friendly towards the national surveillance idea.
Of course, there's already a lot of surveillance and data collection going on in all kinds of organizations, as noted in a post from Schneier on Security, where the concept of "data pollution" is introduced.
The author suggests that the vast quantities of data collected and stored on anyone who does much of anything in the digital world has the danger of becoming the pollution issue of the time. He argues that the casual conversations and exchanges we all have every day are not intended to be preserved and analyzed: we're used to being able to toss off comments or ideas without having others examine them and bring them back to haunt us later, but anyone who puts anything out there in public can't really rely on this.
This is obviously a concern for famous people, many of whom do and say really stupid stuff that amuses or horrifies us as viewers--but if someone followed me around all the time filming me and making note of everything I said, I'd undoubtedly look like an inconsistent, absent-minded, babbling loon.
Also, my makeup and fashion sense would be revealed as dreadful; who dresses me? Half-trained monkeys?
As Schneier says,
Conversation is not the same thing as correspondence. Words uttered in haste over morning coffee, whether spoken in a coffee shop or thumbed on a BlackBerry, are not official correspondence. A data pattern indicating "terrorist tendencies" is no substitute for a real investigation. Being constantly scrutinized undermines our social norms; furthermore, it's creepy. Privacy isn't just about having something to hide; it's a basic right that has enormous value to democracy, liberty, and our humanity.
Well, these days, with our social networking and the wide array of cameras and video, we can all look like babbling loons!
I guess we can take comfort in the fact that there are a lot of us.
*This analogy presented as a shout out to the gluten-intolerant. Rock on, you noble spelt-eaters!
No comments:
Post a Comment