Here at Veritas, besides our own essays on matters of concern, we also bring to your attention many articles we think have merit from our scan of various news and blog sites. Unless we have permission to re-post articles in their entirety we often tease your interest by providing fair use portions in order to entice you to view the entire article. As we have pointed out before, many of the articles have comments from readers appended that are very insightful and meritorious in context of the article as a supplement and even of freestanding merit.
Jonah Goldberg writing at National Review Online has an article titled “Time to Dial Up Some Healthy Skepticism ( subtitled) “Big data” in the hands of Big Government should make us wary.”
His thesis: The arrival of “big data” — the ability to crunch massive amounts of information to find patterns and, ultimately, to manipulate human behavior — creates opportunities for government (and corporations) that were literally unimaginable not long ago. Behavioral economists, neuroscientists, and liberal policy wonks have already fallen in love with the idea of using these new technologies and insights to “nudge” Americans into making “better” decisions. No doubt some of these decisions really are better, but the scare quotes are necessary because the final arbiters of what constitutes the right choice are the would-be social engineers.
Until recently there was great anonymity in crowds. But the near-magic of math has changed that equation. Given a big enough data set, data-crunchers can figure out a great deal about every face in the crowd.
I’m no Luddite. Just because government could, in theory, poison people doesn’t mean it shouldn’t, in practice, inoculate people. But we’re in uncharted territory, and a healthy dose of old-fashioned American skepticism seems warranted, no matter The comment section has who’s in charge.
To start with, at a minimum we share Goldberg’s concerns. But the comment section to his article has some sound additional analysis or bespeaks of implications often missing from the news reports (and other articles) about the data mining abuses perpetrated by Obama and his underlings. The full extent (recommended) can be viewed by linking to Goldberg’s NRO article. We append some selections here for your convenience. The bold typeset is imparted by us to emphasis that portion of the writer’s comments.
jdubya_az writes: Any blogger’s IP is now known, all those who frequent the site are also known as well as their phone info and what other sites, purchases, etc have been exercised. If you really wanted to stop opposing thought you can now punish these individuals selectively and slowly, but surely assume unbridled control over the masses.
Mark Adams writes:“It’s important to emphasize that the NSA isn’t listening to the content of these calls. Indeed, it couldn’t if it wanted to, given the sheer volume of conversations.” Sure it could and probably does – voice recognition > digitization > computer scan for words, names, phrases at squillions of calls per second.
Richard McCargar writes: There is no amount of “safety” that is worth this “cure.”
grahambanks writes: There is no evidence that the government is using this data to ‘connect the dots’ on terrorism as you say. There is also no evidence that they are using this data to track, investigate, or persecute any American for any other reason. We don’t yet know how the data has been utilized. It is dangerous and foolhardy to give ANY government the benefit of the doubt. Governments must never be given benefit of the doubt, they must always be required to defend and justify their encroachments on the freedom of the people, to the satisfaction of the people.
The US government has now usurped the freedom and privacy of likely 300 million Americans, in chasing a relative handful of terrorists. We have turned Blackstone on his head, concerning his legal maxim “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”.
nobody is listening to your phone calls, I promise…tell me the content is NOT being analyzed by computer to identify people by name . . .
xonk writes: Who I call or who calls me, how long we chat, how frequently we chat, etc is a basic right to privacy.
docdave88 writes: Not to sound pedantic, but here’s the pedantry. It’s called Traffic Analysis. If you know who is calling whom, and over time you develop a history and can tie those contacts to an event you don’t need to actually overhear the conversation which, in any event, would be coded assuming the terrorists are not completely stupid. For example – If you know that every time John calls Mary a party happens at 9999 99th street the following Friday night, just monitor either of them, and when that contact is made put on your dancing shoes. Yes, don’t holler. It’s an oversimplification, but an apt one. . . .
cst writes: “I’m all for civil liberties, but why do people care so much if the government knows whom they call, how long they speak, and from where? What are people afraid of …” (Comment at yesterday’s NYT editorial)
These federal agencies are also recording the phone conversations, but can listen only after due process when analysis of the meta-data reveals a link to terrorism. The concern is over abuse. Rather than a targeted, ad hoc data capture after a court warrant, they are essentially, and constantly, wiretapping everyone, storing the yottabytes of information (1 quadrillion gigabytes) in massive data centers like Camp Williams in Utah, and promising they will do the right thing. The consequences of domestic abuse are huge. Then there is the wisdom of gathering and centrally storing information that could be leaked (think Wiki) or compromised by foreign groups. In the end, it’s a dragnet that abets a gag on freedom and (paradoxically) on safety.
surfcat50 writes: Nidal Hassan was monitored in contact with Anwar Al Awlaki and nobody in this government’s intel community thought he was worth looking further at. There was real time intel in Benghazi, notwithstanding Lyon Panetta’s claim otherwise, and this government did nothing with that information. Christmas Day 2009, Times Square bomber, nothing. This government won’t act against terrorists but appears to have no problem gathering data on citizens and perhaps especially the non-leftist ones.
. . . no US administration should have this data. There are ways to analyze comms traffic coming INTO the US from suspect sources, which could provide something much, much closer to the concept of probable cause to then aggregate and analyze, if not actually tap, the calls and e-mails of US citizens.
dicentra writes: They’re capturing every packet off the networks and storing them in Bluffdale, UT. They can extract and read e-mails, VoIP calls, IMs and any other file that crosses the wire.
CopperheadCSA writes: . . . The danger is relative to what the highest level of detail is in the analysed dataset. Once the statistical trend is established, then a targeted analysis of the details conforming to that trend can be peformed, thus identifying specific individuals within. If this was as innocuous . . . the NSA wouldn’t be bothering now would they? . . .trend algorithm is where they START. After they’ve homed in on you, they can get the nasty particulars.
Jim Ryan writes: Imagine an America with a limited government and a fairly virtuous electorate. Under such circumstances, the electorate might reasonably support giving the executive this room to maneuver, just in time of war and only if it might enable us to catch a cell of dirtbags who were planning to slaughter a few thousand of us in a major city.
But under the circumstances in which we actually find ourselves, I am against this program. Our government is corrupt and almost unlimited. I’d rather accept the risk . . .JP writes: This goes beyond collecting metadata on cellphone calls. That metadata is useless unless it can be cross referenced with other data. And even then, the chances of it generating false postives is close to 100%. What should be of concern is on what happens to the massive amount of data being stored in places like the new NSA data center in Utah. Will this one day become nothing more than a division of opposition research for the Democrat Party. We saw how easily it was for the IRS to become nothing more than an extension of the Campaign to Re-Elect Barak Obama. This is very serious.
The Zman writes: . . . The real fear here is exactly what is going on with the IRS and has been going on with government for two decades. That is individual members of the bureaucracy using particular data to harass, extort and blackmail citizens. That’s where the abuse occurs. Local police forces are riddled with sociopaths who love using their special access for nefarious ends.
dicentra writes: The analysis of metadata is far more revealing than listening to a single phone call. Here’s what one prominent NSA whistle-blower revealed about their capabilities: http://qz.com/91765/the-nsa-wh…
. . . The fact that they’re not currently listening in to ALL of our phone conversations is irrelevant.
Old-fashioned wire-tapping required that the circuit be tapped into and the tape be rolling at the time that the call is made. But now, all phone traffic is captured and stored in Bluffdale, UT, where it can be listened to later, at the leisure of the investigator.
OR it can be digitally analyzed at a much faster speed than humans can listen.
the NSA isn’t listening to the content of these calls The NSA is not AUTHORIZED to listen to the content. But doing so takes only a few more mouse-clicks after you’ve analyzed the metadata and figured out who might be worth listening to. . .
The NSA had the opportunity to use a system that masked American citizens’ information during the data-mining, but the agency passed on it: http://foxnewsinsider.com/2013…
Skepticism? That’s for potential crimes. The NSA has been crossing the line almost from the off. PRISM data is used in 1 of 7 NSA reports. They don’t NEED the cooperation of Google and Facebook to tap the fibre-optic trunks, and they don’t NEED any stinking FISA warrants to extract key words from your phone calls.
All comments are unverified as to the accuracy of the claims. Each writer’s full comments and that of many others are available by visiting NRO here. R Mall
