Does Spyware Really Work?
from the sometimes,-in-some-cases dept
MIT's Tech Review has a good article about all the various spyware products being used by the US government to try to prevent things like terrorist attacks. They talk about famous ones such as Echelon, Carnivore and Tempest. However, it also points out that even with most of these technologies, they may be more useful after-the-fact in piecing together what happened, rather than as an early warning system. There is simply too much data to read through. Near the end they mention the civil liberties concerns in passing. What they don't really discuss, though, is that with these new laws making it easier for the government to collect info, they may have made things worse for themselves by simply adding more noise to the data they need to sort through. It seems like they're focusing on getting more data, rather than more targeted data.
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