
Citing Paris Attack, CIA Director Criticizes Surveillance Reform Efforts - umpaloop
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/16/citing-paris-attack-cia-director-criticizes-surveillance-reform-efforts/
======
api
There are legitimate reasons for governments to do sigint, but I think the
burden of proof should be on them to show that increased sigint capability
would have done anything to prevent this attack.

So far I've seen remarkably bupkis in terms of concrete reasoned arguments in
this area. I'd like someone from e.g. the NSA or GCHQ to give a presentation
in which they show that it is feasible to spot terrorist activity in an ocean
of otherwise normal data and differentiate it from e.g. morons talking trash
that they'll never act upon, gamers talking about in-game terrorism, lesser
criminal activity, non-criminal dissent, and other background noise. My strong
intuition is that this is statistically and mathematically impossible and
you'd drown in false positives, but I'd be open to a convincing argument if
these agencies wanted to dignify the public with such an explanation.

Unless such evidence can be furnished, then all this mass surveillance data
mining to "stop terror" amounts to a kind of modern superstition. Back in
ancient times priests collected a lot of money from kings and from the public
in exchange for entrail-gazing and astrological rites to guarantee success in
battle or ward off a poor growing season. None of that crap worked, and I
doubt that big-data entrail gazing works either.

