"There are no technological magic spells."

Hello?

You probably have, in your hand, a device which can actually call an AI system which will talk to you in your language about any problem you might have.

You can actually look at the surfaces of the Moon and Mars, with the same program that lets you check out addresses all over the Earth.

It's not magic. It's technology: not gadgets, but the application of technical solutions to apparent problems.

If you have a picture of an entire party scene, you can tell who was there. Sonar can now draw a pretty good picture of everything for miles around, at sea, and can actually be used in total darkness to produce a video image.

First, you gather the information, then you decode it. This principle is real, AND it works, however big a threat to liberty it might pose. That's the real rub.

This would be very similar to inspecting every part in order to produce quality parts, instead of looking for the patterns that produce defective parts.

There just aren't enough people to inspect every feature of every part, any more than we can expect to inspect our way to complete safety.

In either case, we have to expect some failures, unfortunately. The alternative is paralysis.

I figure, with my hundreds of emails and comments and postings all over the blabbosphere, that I'm helping to bollux up the works. The more stuff we throw out there for them to comb through, the bigger the haystack. That needle, in comparison, gets harder and harder to find. Just as the Tsarnaevs -- as so many of us have been pointing out -- weren't detected.

The negligence of our intelligene agences led to 9/11 and the negligence of our intelligence agencies led to the Boston Marathon bombing.

But none of this matters. Our country, instead of learning from its mistakes (and idiocies) won't change; it'll just double down.

Expect more and more and more draconian measures and violations of civil liberties in the coming years.

(And re the LAX shooting, how long before those of us who criticize the TSA get blamed for "inciting" this obviously mentally unbalanced guy?)

First, you gather the information, then you decode it. This principle is real, AND it works, however big a threat to liberty it might pose. That's the real rub. -- Radwaste at November 2, 2013 3:28 AM

The problem is that the vast surveillance net that is recording every call will pick up everything that is overt: "She is da bomb."; "The TSA needs to be destroyed."; "The only reason Obama hasn't been assassinated is because Biden would be worse and Obama would be made into a martyr."

That means you will have the NSA looking at those who are mildly to overtly people pissed off at the government. Or those who just use the right set of colloquialisms. Meanwhile you aren't going to spot the actual terrorists like the Tsarnaev brothers because you are expending thousands of hours of manpower looking at the history of innocuous people.

This is why the TSA is a waste of time as well. You have thousands of barely trained people harassing a 60 year old guy with a colostomy bag or a 50 year old woman carrying her mother's ashes. Do you think they are a probable threat?

I'm not even going to get into the use of the Constitution to line the litter box.

Jim, I think you're making the wrong assertion here.

Data miners KNOW what innocuous remarks are.

Want an example of how intelligent programs can weed out meaningless material?

Just look in your SPAM folder.

And that's just a minor application.

-----

Now, when the system pulls a ranking out of the jumble of information and calls Mr. Finch, one must hope that he and Mr. Reese understand about civil liberties and doesn't intend to generate public terror to advance the police state. I think we both understand that the goals of any agency do not mesh precisely with our own.

"Data miners KNOW what innocuous remarks are."

Oh really? Is that why a woman who was researching pressure cookers on-line got a visit from the FBI?

Catalano says that the men in casual clothes told her husband that "they do this about 100 times a week. And that 99 of those visits turn out to be nothing."

http://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-shows-up-at-journalists-door-2013-8

And why another journalist just got her house invaded and busted up by a SWAT team at 4:30 in the morning? Not allowed to leave link because Amy limits to 1 link per comment. Will post link now in new comment.

As promised:

http://abombazine.blogspot.com/2013/10/armed-cops-raid-home-of-american.html

Just look in your SPAM folder. And that's just a minor application. -- Radwaste at November 2, 2013 7:37 AM

You're right a SPAM filter is a good example. But let's look at the scale. Currently I have 457 spam e-mails in the folder. I also had two in my inbox this week. Then I also get about an additional 250 e-mails each week between tech sites and various subscriptions, including Cheaper Than Dirt, the NRA, and the USCCA.

So if you figure that the I am typical of the normal e-mail users that is a about a .1% failure rate. Now you are scanning 100M emails, a week, that .1% equates to a 10,000,000 million that then needs secondary evaluation. And even call a .1% failure in the automated secondary evaluation and you come back to 1,000,000 that needs a third or additional evaluation.

So you have to build a database of everyone that has come into the additional processing queue. In my case I have a primary gmail account, secondary yahoo account, my website's email accounts (which I can make throwaway accounts by the dozens in two different domains), my work e-mails (my original and the account from the new acquisition, plus the access to e-mail accounts I use with the various service accounts to monitor systems). So essentially you would have to monitor over a dozen accounts for me alone.

Then there is the cell phones. I have a landline as well. And at work I have my phone and access to numerous other phones. Then there are the burner cell phones I could get my hands on.

Multiply that by 70 million people that could do the same thing.

No matter how you do the data mining it is going to be the equivalent of finding a speck of gold on a 3 mile long beach, if not worse.

The ROI doesn't add up.

You know, a guy with a semi-automatic rifle just walked into LAX and shot the place up.

If this system worked, they would have stopped him beforehand.

I'm sure they also monitor drug traffickers' communications, so why are billions of dollars worth of cocaine, heroin, meth, and pot still turning up in the USA?

It's not working.

Good gravy. Get a clue.

I'm telling you how technology advances not where it IS!

The system being speculated about doesn't exist yet. There ARE significant problems with what is done with the information.

Henry Ford did not build a Lexus, ever, but the industry of which he was a key part resulted in the Lexus, and other cars for which any part failure is completely unexpected.

"There just aren't enough people to inspect every feature of every part, any more than we can expect to inspect our way to complete safety."

This is not what is done today. If you have the chance to attend a Performance Racing Industry show, do it. Inside, you will find everything necessary to build any part of anything automotive, from raw materials to CAM devices and robotics. Parts are inspected by the same machine that builds them now, and they generate reports on their progess; they even change their own cutting heads when they're dull. Cost is the only limitation.
This process is an extension of W. Edwards Deming's statistical control methods for process management; it has become necessary for the devices to detect problems because they are not reliably visible to the naked eye!

You're assuming the purpose of these agencies is to catch terrorists.

I don't think it is.

"In the real, practical world this is--though it might seem counterintuitive--untrue."

It isn't counterintuitive though. It seems to me to be the difference between buckshot and a laser beam.

"I'm sure they also monitor drug traffickers' communications, so why are billions of dollars worth of cocaine, heroin, meth, and pot still turning up in the USA?"

Did you seriously just put pot in the same category as meth?

You're assuming the purpose of these agencies is to catch terrorists.
I don't think it is.

NicoleK has it right. The above is the official excuse. The real purpose is two-fold:

1) Create jobs and contracts that can be doled out as rewards for political support;

2) Collect information on political enemies that can be used to get them out of the way and/or punish them.

The system being speculated about doesn't exist yet. There ARE significant problems with what is done with the information.

At least you are realizing that the Constitutional violations are significant.

Henry Ford did not build a Lexus, ever, but the industry of which he was a key part resulted in the Lexus, and other cars for which any part failure is completely unexpected. -- Radwaste at November 2, 2013 1:54 PM

What Henry Ford created was the assembly line. That meant that what used to be custom crafted autos with near surgical skill by the various private manufacturers was now eclipsed a mass manufacturer with no individual person being responsible that everything works right. So now you can go out and buy a Ford, Chevy, Toyota or Kia and know that you are protected by the various lemon law.

Or you can buy a Ferrari, Lamborghini, or Rolls Royce and know that the signature on the builder document is the guy the company is going to look at if the vehicle breaks in normal use.

This is the same thing that is happening with the NSA mass scanning. It is going to get 500K lemons and won't catch the individual spike that an individual investigator's feelings will have until it is way too late.

"Did you seriously just put pot in the same category as meth?"

Yes. Both are smuggled from Mexico by murderous drug cartels.

Unless there's a harmless Barney And Friends pot cartel that you'd like to tell us about.

I think NicoleK and V-Man have it right.

The purpose of the NSA's massive collection of data on ordinary Americans isn't to prevent terrorism. That's just pretext.

The real purpose is to collect massive amounts of data on ordinary Americans. For the reasons V-Man stated, as well as many other nefarious reasons.

First, you gather the information, then you decode it. This principle is real, AND it works,

Yes yes. But there's a great quote from Saving Private Ryan when they're sorting through dead airborne troopers dog tags it's like searching for a needle in a stack of needles.

Yes, you can find a needle. That's easy. What's hard is finding the precise needle that you're looking for. That becomes even harder when you have vast quantities of needles to sort thru. Especially needles that look just like the one you're looking for, but aren't it.

But I guess we can adapt an old saying, and when you get smoked by a drone due to a false positive, well, what's done is done and can't be helped now.

Data miners KNOW what innocuous remarks are.

Speedbump Tsarnev should have been sprouting red flags to hell and back. Yet, somehow, that never made it on well anyone's radar.

Speedbump - 1
Dataminers - 0

"Or you can buy a Ferrari, Lamborghini, or Rolls Royce and know that the signature on the builder document is the guy the company is going to look at if the vehicle breaks in normal use."

Why are you even talking about breakage if this personal attention is all that?

You should know that no one at Petit LeMans, at Road Atlanta, was racing a Lamborghini, despite their street appeal, but here's the rub:

The craftsmen building exclusive cars are using the SAME design and manufacturing machinery that mass-production plants use. That's why I linked to the PRI Web site.

Here's the concept again: quality controls depend on monitoring by the same machines that make parts today, because differences are not visible to the naked eye - no matter how skilled.

Why are you even talking about breakage if this personal attention is all that? -- Radwaste at November 3, 2013 6:17 PM

Ok, you can't grasp the mass car to custom car idea.

How about buying wood furniture from Ikea compared to buying it from the master carpenter in your neighborhood?

How about buying milk and cheese from the grocery store compared to your local Amish farmers?

How about comparing the Sara Lee© chocolate cake to the one your wife baked from scratch?

The idea is that the NSA is going to the beach and running all the sand through a filter to find the one seashell that is 4.37 centimeters in circumference with a rainbow pattern on the back. But it will also find many other seashells that with no rainbow pattern but are 4.37 centimeters in circumference or many with a rainbow pattern but are not 4.37 centimeters in circumference. So then they waste time looking at those.

Meanwhile the clam that is still inhabiting the shell that is 4.37 centimeters in circumference with a rainbow pattern on the back on the other end of the beach being filtered will go to deeper water.

I don't know if you're trying to be obtuse, but claiming that quantity will prove out the quality of the NSA method has yet to be proven. And there have been several failures, including 9/11.

"I don't know if you're trying to be obtuse, but claiming that quantity will prove out the quality of the NSA method has yet to be proven."

Jim, you missed the boat entirely.

Entirely. Did you know my job is validating process control engineering changes?

Mass production is a key part of the vertical development of the automotive industry. It generated interest and income which was then revolutionized by Deming's impact on the assembly-line process: proving that design impacted execution to a far greater degree than the other way 'round. People thought you should build, then cull; that's WRONG. As I have been trying to explain, building now has its quality controls built into the manufacturing process. Tools can measure the material being worked, even to the point of detecting the wrong alloy.

But let me go back to the beginning, to address the quote of your words. I said, "If you have a picture of an entire party scene, you can tell who was there." The corollary is that is you do NOT have a picture of everyone, you CANNOT tell who was there.
The gathering of information is a LOGIC PROBLEM, not one of political will, moral rectitude or anything else. You MUST have all the information to make decisions to the degree ECHELON or its derivatives offer. When that is done, it must be remembered that logic is the LAST thing on the mind of the police in need of more money, or the pol in search of more power. That interferes with the process!

I'm not being obtuse. I just had no idea I wasn't explaining this in the right terms.

As to how the algorithm would work: Mr. Finch's Machine would note that contentious topics are mentioned on here on a regular basis. All the IP numbers are checked. Residences are checked. All this is buffered. A comment on how to damage airliners was posted by Yours Truly some months ago. Someone who has visited this blog, and who has never bought a rifle from a dealer uses a credit card to buy ammunition in a caliber she doesn't own, and the same credit card is used in two gas stops between the owner's home and Hartsville-Jackson airport (Atlanta). At each stage, the "score" goes up, until the Machine calls the cop at the airport entrance on his cell phone and transmits the DL picture.

If you think none of this happens now, maybe it's time to think on why the TSA has nothing to do. IF there is a threat, it is being intercepted somehow. Of course, there may not be one.

If you think none of this happens now, maybe it's time to think on why the TSA has nothing to do. IF there is a threat, it is being intercepted somehow. Of course, there may not be one. -- Radwaste at November 5, 2013 3:34 PM

You may be right that there is a benevolent person/group that has Mr. Finch's computer that has stopped all further 9/11 type attacks.

But if such a machine existed why didn't it stop Sandy Hook?* How about Aurora's Theater attack? How about the Paramus mall attack. Gabbie Giffords was post 9/11. Why was that allowed to happen?

Actually, I'd like you to read There Will Be Dragons which can actually be free with the Kindle version.

While you are reading that, juxtapose the thought that "mother" is watching you constantly and putting out limits that makes a .45 semi-auto a restricted item, but a knife isn't.

But still people die in mass quantities.

The POI idea is a good idea in one sense. But I'd rather have to fight off a false accusation, rather than have my day-to-day life monitored.

Right now the presumption the NSA is working from is that you are guilty until proven innocent. The state should be required to prove your guilt.

* -- I refuse to use the mass killers names on principle.