

If spying on citizens was a business - clubhi

If spying on citizens was a business I would ignore Google and Facebook.<p>Wouldn&#x27;t it be better to hook into a few major desktop players.<p>You have your Adobe Acrobat type programs that are wide spread and lots of chatty client&#x2F;server communication.<p>Better yet, you can your anti-virus programs. These also have lots of network activity. Better yet they come with escalated system privileges.<p>And the more obvious. You have Windows&#x2F;OSX. Both closed source and are now always phoning home.<p>I realize you can&#x27;t do as much on a single system as you can with an aggregated data set back at your main server. But it seems like you only need a  few bytes of flags to be able to deduce that this system is worth looking into further.<p>Sometimes less is more. If spying on citizens was a business... Forget about downloading all the data in the world. Reduce it at client side and send back the results.
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cheeseprocedure
Sadly, it _is_ a business, and it's become an entrenched part of the political
landscape. It's hard to read "Top Secret America" [1] and not come to that
conclusion.

A lack of transparency for intelligence operations means their outcomes are
difficult to measure, which in turn means the bang-for-the-buck efficacy of
those operations is probably not a significant deciding factor in the funding
they receive.

[1] [http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-
america&#x2F](http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america&#x2F);

