Latest Revelations Show How Collecting All The Haystacks To Find The Needle Makes The NSA's Job Harder

from the and-makes-us-all-less-safe dept

Yet another post about the latest NSA revelations about collecting buddy lists and email contacts. As we'd mentioned in the original post, the story noted that this data collection was at times overwhelming. Here's the Washington Post's report on this point:

The volume of NSA contacts collection is so high that it has occasionally threatened to overwhelm storage repositories, forcing the agency to halt its intake with “emergency detasking” orders. Three NSA documents describe short-term efforts to build an “across-the-board technology throttle for truly heinous data” and longer-term efforts to filter out information that the NSA does not need.

Spam has proven to be a significant problem for NSA — clogging databases with data that holds no foreign intelligence value. The majority of all e-mails, one NSA document says, “are SPAM from ‘fake’ addresses and never ‘delivered’ to targets.”

In fall 2011, according to an NSA presentation, the Yahoo account of an Iranian target was “hacked by an unknown actor,” who used it to send spam. The Iranian had “a number of Yahoo groups in his/her contact list, some with many hundreds or thousands of members.”

The cascading effects of repeated spam messages, compounded by the automatic addition of the Iranian’s contacts to other people’s address books, led to a massive spike in the volume of traffic collected by the Australian intelligence service on the NSA’s behalf.

After nine days of data-bombing, the Iranian’s contact book and contact books for several people within it were “emergency detasked.”

Here's a slide from the leaked NSA presentation, in which it urges people to be more careful about what kind of data it collects via this program, saying they're trying to "store less of the wrong data" and "shift the collection philosophy at the NSA" to "memorialize what you need" from "order one of everything off the menu and eat what you want." This is the very same NSA which is led by Keith Alexander, whose unofficial motto has been described as "collect it all." At times, Alexander has argued in public that "you need the haystack to find the needle."

Of course, that's bogus, and the data deluge discussed in this program demonstrated why. Collecting it all makes it harder to find the right information. Piling more hay on the haystack doesn't make it easier to find the needle, it makes it harder. That's one of many reasons why we're so concerned about these bulk data collection programs. Not only do they rarely seem to turn up useful information, but they also seem to better obscure important information by flooding the system with bogus data.

Filed Under: haystacks, keith alexander, needles, nsa, nsa surveillance, too much information

Latest Bizarre Proposal: Save Democracy By Taxing Energy To Make It Too Expensive To Blog

from the say-what-now? dept

Okay, we see all sorts of crackpot ideas and theories show up from time to time, but it's not often that you get one quite this bizarre published in a publication quite as respectable as the Washington Post. Yet here is the venerable Washington Post with an op-ed from the lawyer, Dusty Horwitt, for a "nonprofit environmental group" in Washington DC complaining that blogging and other types of internet content are somehow a drag on democracy, and the solution is for the government to raise energy taxes such that it would make it too expensive for the riffraff to continue owning computers with internet connections, thereby reducing this flood of information. Yes, I think he's serious. There is, I will admit, a chance that this is pure satire. If so, I'll just tip my hat and admit that I was fooled -- but let's move forward on the assumption this is serious.

There are so many troubling aspects to this op-ed that it's difficult to know where to start. First, he brings up the classic complaint that the internet today is producing "too much information." Apparently, he believes that all this bad information somehow prevents good information from being distributed. Good information, by the way, is apparently information published in traditional newspapers. He uses a troubling interpretation of a few questionable stats to establish this -- assuming that because some people spend less time on various online sites, they're somehow not getting access to the good information that they need. He doesn't seem to consider that websites and the ease of publishing now allows people to get access to more good information that it was difficult to come by in the past.

He then goes on to suggest that true social movements have only happened because of the scarcity of broadcast media options, which somehow forced everyone to hear only a single message. This is, apparently, a good thing -- because obviously the big professional media only reports on the important stuff, whereas everyone else only reports on bad stuff. He honestly makes the claim that the civil rights movement wouldn't have happened today, because all of these other media would have drowned out the issue. It was only because a few newspapers decided that it was important to cover it -- and because people had nowhere else to get distracted -- that people actually made civil rights an issue. Today, I guess, we'd all just go back to watching hamsters hit each other on YouTube.

So, the problem, as he has described it is that all these damn people are talking to each other online, rather than listening to what the big important "good" media has to tell us. He says that the answer isn't necessarily to tax the technology of production -- though he considers this -- but to tax energy. He recognizes that it takes energy to use a computer and connect to the internet, so if it's much more expensive, he believes that plenty of folks would give up talking, and go back to being passive consumers of what the big professional media says is important today. As a side benefit (no, seriously), he points out that this increasing cost of energy would probably make it too expensive to offshore jobs. These would be the same jobs that have helped create new jobs and grow the economy (he leaves that part out). It's a wonder his proposal hasn't already been turned into legislation. Who wouldn't support a policy of higher energy costs to shut up the riff raff and make Americans have to pay more for just about everything?

Filed Under: blogging, dusty horwitt, energy, journalism, taxes, too much information