Another slightly biased video...
"if you're looking for a needle in a haystack, adding more hay won't help"
I disagree with this in this context - the reason being that there are multiple needles and an infinite amount of hay. If the goal is to find as many needles as possible, expanding the haystack is the only way to find more.
Also they're claiming the success rate isn't very good but do we really know for sure? The data hasn't been released...
I don't necessarily agree with more surveillance because who watches the watchers etc., but I do think it's not as simple as this video makes out to be. There does have to be a compromise
There is no such thing as perfectly a unbiased video (or anything for that matter).
Even if the video was pure statistics, those statistics could just as easily be biased or presented in a biased way or simply fail to properly present an issue because there are a near infinite amount of factors that can go into any one problem and there is no practical way to study them all.
And, to be quite honest, I don't think people should be pretending every opinion is equally valid just so that they don't appear biased.
And their analogy, if somewhat simplistic, makes sense.
Firstly, more hay does not equate to more needles. Terrorists aren't exactly commonplace, so you could add whole cities worth of people to you watch list and it would not be unlikely for not a single one of these people to be a terrorist.
Secondly, you need to bare in mind that the goal is not to find as many needles as possible, the goal is to find needles as they appear - and quickly. Therefore, a system that entails handling such vast amounts of data as the every online action of every person in the country, or quite possibly even outside the country, is going to be, at best, sloppy.
lol remember that time 'we demanded more security'?
[QUOTE=Trumple;50133157]Another slightly biased video...
"if you're looking for a needle in a haystack, adding more hay won't help"
I disagree with this in this context - the reason being that there are multiple needles and an infinite amount of hay. If the goal is to find as many needles as possible,[B] expanding the haystack is the only way to find more[/B].
Also they're claiming the success rate isn't very good but do we really know for sure? The data hasn't been released...
I don't necessarily agree with more surveillance because who watches the watchers etc., but I do think it's not as simple as this video makes out to be. There does have to be a compromise[/QUOTE]
lol, what? Since when did that ever become an efficient or viable solution? How about taking a magnet to the haystack, or some other solution that rapidly and accurately finds the needles instead of expanding the work required. Did that ever occur?
I'm also not sure you understand how watchlists function. There are specific jobs whose sole purpose is to maintain those watchlists, and they are monitored by their superiors (aka their boss in whatever respective field they're in. Typically this is done in the NSA so you'd likely have a senior level analyst monitoring for any misdirections).
They're claiming the success rate isn't good because it isn't good. It's a known fact that the Intelligence Community has critically failed over and over in the past few decades in preparation of 9/11, in response to it, and in moving on from it. There are literally analysts who George Bush hired while he was president to write in the [URL="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/sept11/911Report.pdf"]9/11 Commission Report[/URL] just how badly the community fucked up. I don't think I need to provide the Snowden documents here just because of how many there are, but look at any amount of them versus how many terrorists they've caught and observe the minimal effectiveness the creations of the NSA has achieved.
[QUOTE=Rufia;50133750]Secondly, you need to bare in mind that the goal is not to find as many needles as possible, the goal is to find needles as they appear - and quickly. Therefore, a system that entails handling such vast amounts of data as the every online action of every person in the country, or quite possibly even outside the country, is going to be, at best, sloppy.[/QUOTE]
I highly encourage you to look up ICREACH, JWICS, SIPRNet, GWAN, and Intelink. If you want a bigger list [URL="http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/8-extremely-little-known-corners-of-the-us-intelligence-networkand-4-more?news=838962"]there's more here[/URL] for department specific networks as well. The speed at which information can travel, the amount that's collected, and the ease of access is obscene and it's used by a vast majority (if not all, I don't know) of the Intelligence Community, Department of Defense, Homeland Security, Department of State, DoJ, etc. It's an extremely robust system of networks and unnerving as well.
Always loved Kurzgesagt but this shits beyond one politicly side facing. Pretty obvious when the president is trump.
I like how this mimics in every way the Russian secret service that had German Nazi's working for them when Germany was still partly controlled by Russia.
It was discovered that this group had almost 40 years of mail and files on normal people after the wall fell.
[QUOTE=WitheredGryphon;50134678]lol, what? Since when did that ever become an efficient or viable solution? How about taking a magnet to the haystack, or some other solution that rapidly and accurately finds the needles instead of expanding the work required. Did that ever occur?
I'm also not sure you understand how watchlists function. There are specific jobs whose sole purpose is to maintain those watchlists, and they are monitored by their superiors (aka their boss in whatever respective field they're in. Typically this is done in the NSA so you'd likely have a senior level analyst monitoring for any misdirections).
[/QUOTE]
I'm sure in many cases the suspects are manually added to watch lists. But that isn't how mass surveillance works. Mass surveillance would be impossible without the use of machines to sift through all the hay. Machines do the wide search, humans will follow up on what the machine thinks is relevant. Given an ever-expanding pool of computational power, the machines are able to process more and more hay, looking for things that look like needles but need humans to verify. Therefore, more hay -> more potential needles. We can always improve the needle searching algorithm - I'm sure that is currently taking place now and will be applied to both historic data and new data going forwards. But, if we don't have the data to search, we might miss something.
[QUOTE=WitheredGryphon;50134678]
They're claiming the success rate isn't good because it isn't good. It's a known fact that the Intelligence Community has critically failed over and over in the past few decades in preparation of 9/11, in response to it, and in moving on from it. There are literally analysts who George Bush hired while he was president to write in the [URL="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/sept11/911Report.pdf"]9/11 Commission Report[/URL] just how badly the community fucked up. I don't think I need to provide the Snowden documents here just because of how many there are, but look at any amount of them versus how many terrorists they've caught and observe the minimal effectiveness the creations of the NSA has achieved.
[/QUOTE]
You're basing your information on the failures of the Intelligence Community in a time when they didn't have access to the mass surveillance tools we're discussing. If anything, the fact the Intelligence Community failed to detect 9/11 is an indication that more surveillance is needed, counter to your argument.
"look at the amount of Snowden reports vs how many terrorists they've caught" - what? How is that a valid measure of the success rate of the current intelligence programs? You seem to be operating with more information than I have - so tell us, just how many terrorists [B]have[/B] they caught?
You know, I'll never understand you Trumple.
San Bernidino happens in a modern day super surveillance state, an exact example of how little this mass data gathering does, and you cry for more surveillance.
I hope I die before we turn into the society people like you demand.
The NSA's unreigned in authority scares me. It doesn't even phase you. You trust a security agency to the end of the worlds it would seem even though, time and time again, they've proved they don't deserve the trust.
Complacency with security and surveillance like we're seeing in the modern context is straight up scary.
[QUOTE=HumanAbyss;50138917]You know, I'll never understand you Trumple.
San Bernidino happens in a modern day super surveillance state, an exact example of how little this mass data gathering does, and you cry for more surveillance.
I hope I die before we turn into the society people like you demand.
The NSA's unreigned in authority scares me. It doesn't even phase you. You trust a security agency to the end of the worlds it would seem even though, time and time again, they've proved they don't deserve the trust.
Complacency with security and surveillance like we're seeing in the modern context is straight up scary.[/QUOTE]
I'm sort of playing devils advocate here. In reality, if the NSA and GCHQ were perfect angels and could be 100% trusted with the data, I don't think anyone really has the right to complain. With that said, the complains come because we don't know if these entities [I]can[/I] be trusted. They work on our behalf, in theory, and I'd like to think they wouldn't be used wrongly.
It does scare me to think of the potential for misuse, but at the same time I can see its potential application.
[editline]15th April 2016[/editline]
Basically what I'm saying is that I don't have a solution for the problem, but I also don't think the solution is to scrap surveillance entirely
No of course the solution isn't to tear it all down.
As I see it, the solution is to reign in our shadow organizations. It took years for congress to find out exactly how far the NSA had overstepped it's bounds. That's not acceptable. There's just something wrong with NSA employees passing around photos of naked people that they collected for a laugh. I deal with privacy law all the time in my current job, and any even slight infringement of it means a review by a governmental board, and a high chance of losing my licence. The idea of combatting terrorism through privacy invasions irks me on so many levels and has been proven ineffective.
[QUOTE=Trumple;50138850]I'm sure in many cases the suspects are manually added to watch lists. But that isn't how mass surveillance works. Mass surveillance would be impossible without the use of machines to sift through all the hay. Machines do the wide search, humans will follow up on what the machine thinks is relevant. Given an ever-expanding pool of computational power, the machines are able to process more and more hay, looking for things that look like needles but need humans to verify. Therefore, more hay -> more potential needles. We can always improve the needle searching algorithm - I'm sure that is currently taking place now and will be applied to both historic data and new data going forwards. But, if we don't have the data to search, we might miss something.[/quote]
That's not even true at all. You assume that there HAS to be more needles because you add more hay and that isn't the case. I'm not sure why you are even making that assumption in the first place. A small amount of hay could contain a ton of needles whereas a large amount of hay could contain zero. You're assuming that adding more hay would somehow generate more needles and that isn't the case, it adds more to the already overload of information that analysts work through. You don't seem to have even the simplest of a grasp on how the Intelligence Community even currently functions, let alone what they should be doing in the future.
[QUOTE=Trumple;50138850]You're basing your information on the failures of the Intelligence Community in a time when they didn't have access to the mass surveillance tools we're discussing. If anything, the fact the Intelligence Community failed to detect 9/11 is an indication that more surveillance is needed, counter to your argument.
"look at the amount of Snowden reports vs how many terrorists they've caught" - what? How is that a valid measure of the success rate of the current intelligence programs? You seem to be operating with more information than I have - so tell us, just how many terrorists [B]have[/B] they caught?[/QUOTE]
I'm basing my information off what I've learned thus far as an Intelligence major in college. I've written a bunch of papers going over this stuff, tens of thousands of words in discussions with other Intel students, and I've read a lot more to back it up.
The fact that the Intelligence Community didn't have access to the mass surveillance tools they have today was NOT the reason 9/11 occurred. [URL="http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/rdenever/USNatSecandForeignPol/Zegart.pdf"]The Intelligence Community had already fully identified one of the hijackers prior to the attack[/URL], and the CIA simply failed to react in time. It was an adaptation failure of the IC moving from the Cold War era where the IC were facing a "traditional" enemy to the war on terrorism, something that they were not prepared for in the slightest. The IC were fully capable of identifying the hijackers with the tools they had on hand at the time. The direct spending on counterterrorism during the 90s had quintupled. This was simply a full blown failure to adapt to the new terrorist threat.
I also don't think you've even looked at the Snowden documents (as I said, documents, not reports), because they detail systems within the Intelligence Community and how they operate. But since you asked how many terrorists they've caught using the systems within them:
[URL="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/21/fbi-admits-patriot-act-snooping-powers-didnt-crack/?page=all"]FBI admits Patriot Act has NOT helped to crack any major cases.[/URL]
[URL="http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/nsa-program-stopped-no-terror-attacks-says-white-house-panel-f2D11783588"]White House panel member George Stone admits NSA program has stopped 0 terrorism terror attacks[/URL]
[URL="https://theintercept.com/2015/11/17/u-s-mass-surveillance-has-no-record-of-thwarting-large-terror-attacks-regardless-of-snowden-leaks/"]Mass Surveillance has helped to stop 0 terrorist attacks on the US according to CIA Director John Brennan[/URL] (though he even says none have even been planned in the first place, so what good would increasing surveillance do?)
I could go on, but if you want more examples you are free to look them up on your own. Blindly putting trust in a mass surveillance program that has produced little to no results leads to complacency which you seem to be totally ok with. Complacency leads to apathy though and I for one am not ok with that.
Kind of wish Kurzgesagt would stick to science stuff?
[QUOTE=Viper_;50133936]lol remember that time 'we demanded more security'?[/QUOTE]
Uh yeah, there were tons of people from all over the world demanding more secutiry in the wake of 9/11.
[QUOTE=WitheredGryphon;50140787]That's not even true at all. You assume that there HAS to be more needles because you add more hay and that isn't the case. I'm not sure why you are even making that assumption in the first place. A small amount of hay could contain a ton of needles whereas a large amount of hay could contain zero. You're assuming that adding more hay would somehow generate more needles and that isn't the case, it adds more to the already overload of information that analysts work through. You don't seem to have even the simplest of a grasp on how the Intelligence Community even currently functions, let alone what they should be doing in the future.
[/quote]
There's two prongs of intelligence gathering I think we're talking about here. One is the traditional, human analyst looking at information and building a bigger picture. The other is the machine side, the one that I'm talking about. If you're saying that the IC bases its information PURELY on human analysis of raw data gathered by machines, then one of us is deeply misunderstanding something. I don't believe for 1 second that machines aren't employed to sift through the vast amounts of hay in a wide search, discovering potential needles before handing it over to humans for deeper analysis.
Of course, being clever about where you source your hay from is a good idea. Clearly you want to target high-risk people in the population, but the problem is that's very hard to discover whether someone is high-risk or not. So presently they take the "scatter-gun" approach of targeting everyone. Which I don't necessarily agree with, but I also can't see a better solution.
[QUOTE=WitheredGryphon;50140787]
I'm basing my information off what I've learned thus far as an Intelligence major in college. I've written a bunch of papers going over this stuff, tens of thousands of words in discussions with other Intel students, and I've read a lot more to back it up.
The fact that the Intelligence Community didn't have access to the mass surveillance tools they have today was NOT the reason 9/11 occurred. [URL="http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/rdenever/USNatSecandForeignPol/Zegart.pdf"]The Intelligence Community had already fully identified one of the hijackers prior to the attack[/URL], and the CIA simply failed to react in time. It was an adaptation failure of the IC moving from the Cold War era where the IC were facing a "traditional" enemy to the war on terrorism, something that they were not prepared for in the slightest. The IC were fully capable of identifying the hijackers with the tools they had on hand at the time. The direct spending on counterterrorism during the 90s had quintupled. This was simply a full blown failure to adapt to the new terrorist threat.
I also don't think you've even looked at the Snowden documents (as I said, documents, not reports), because they detail systems within the Intelligence Community and how they operate. But since you asked how many terrorists they've caught using the systems within them:
[URL="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/21/fbi-admits-patriot-act-snooping-powers-didnt-crack/?page=all"]FBI admits Patriot Act has NOT helped to crack any major cases.[/URL]
[URL="http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/nsa-program-stopped-no-terror-attacks-says-white-house-panel-f2D11783588"]White House panel member George Stone admits NSA program has stopped 0 terrorism terror attacks[/URL]
[URL="https://theintercept.com/2015/11/17/u-s-mass-surveillance-has-no-record-of-thwarting-large-terror-attacks-regardless-of-snowden-leaks/"]Mass Surveillance has helped to stop 0 terrorist attacks on the US according to CIA Director John Brennan[/URL] (though he even says none have even been planned in the first place, so what good would increasing surveillance do?)
I could go on, but if you want more examples you are free to look them up on your own. Blindly putting trust in a mass surveillance program that has produced little to no results leads to complacency which you seem to be totally ok with. Complacency leads to apathy though and I for one am not ok with that.[/QUOTE]
It's interesting to see that the CIA director said mass surveillance has stopped 0 terrorist attacks because "none have been planned". How can they be confident none have been planned? Is it really fair to say mass surveillance isn't working because it hasn't caught anyone, because there's no one to be caught yet?
Just because no one is currently trying to break your front door down, doesn't mean you should remove your front door.
And yes, I realize mass surveillance is not as passive as having a front door. I honestly don't know the answers to privacy invasion, but like I said before, if the NSA and the likes COULD be trusted, we should have no complaints. More transparency? More oversight?
One final point. You have to ask yourself what benefit the government gains with mass-surveillance. You're suggesting the government has an ulterior motive that isn't to stop terrorism. So what is it? (That's an honest question, not a rhetorical one)
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