For a player at the level the CIA should be concerned with, determining the extent of electro-magnetic communication leaving the home isn't that hard. For the average Joe, its impossible. So its like we're entering the intelligence laziness, where the hard earned real intelligence products are replaced with pasteurized processed intelligence food: Gigabytes of data on how and when Ahmed Nobody is toasting his bread from his IPV6 toaster become passed off as critical intelligence, while the real players move behind the scenes unnoticed. At some point the profound realization is going to come: terrabytes of data on the guy sitting on his couch isn't worth a hell of a lot, no matter how hard its spun by those invested. Sure, the possibility still exists for the Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy machine which can deduce the universe from a piece of cake, and learn about thus Iran from Ahmed, but that takes deep thoughtful deductive work, the exact kind of work that went out the window when it was decided that lots of data from Ahmed's toaster was worth more than real intelligence, and all the work involved in that.

In order to describe what you have said here.

My first take on the OP was: 'Yeah, but there's not much they can really DO with all that.'

You said it all in one (albeit ADHD) paragraph.

It was meta-good.

I appreciate that.

Thnx for that.

You're relying, as a lot of us do, on the notion that there's just no way a technology could be advanced enough to sift through the "gigabytes of data" from seemingly endless innocuous sources and construct a useful piece of intelligence.

It's the "anonymity in a crowd" philosophy writ large for the digital age. And it's almost certainly wrong.

Here's the analogy I use with technology a lot. Consider this aircraft, the SR-71 Blackbird:



"Fastest air-breathing aircraft in the world." Pretty well-known for doing it, travels faster than a rifle bullet, 3.5 times the speed of sound.

It was designed in the 1950s. Original design (A-12) rolled onto the tarmac and took to the air in 1962, 50 years ago.

50 years before that, this was the state-of-the-art in aircraft:



Even assuming the (unlikely) possibility that technology advances in the last 50 years have been merely linear, the reasonable conclusion is that there is something flying around out there that is as far ahead of the Blackbird as the Blackbird was ahead of the biplane.

That is every bit as difficult to imagine as a clandestine intelligence "program" that can sift through billions of terrabytes of information and produce actionable results. And it's every bit as likely.

for 100 year periods in singular applications. Yes, we can build remotely-piloted Mach 7 scram jets and sometimes we show this stuff off (e.g., the "UFO" over China last year), but the X-47/51 follow-on isn't orders of magnitude more advanced than the SR-71/X-15 technology of the 1950s.

It would take a real order of magnitude advance to develop a Pre-cog type actionable CT intelligence program from the mass driftnets and profiling algorithms NSA/DHS uses today. The electronic take is so compromised by program considerations -- we don't want to blow double-agents already in place in targeted groups -- that even when we do obtain hard actionable intelligence, most of the time nothing is done with it.

...any more than the farmers looking overhead in the 60s knew what *they* were looking at.

Every problem you're describing could be overcome with a "program" that was advanced enough, complicated enough, and fast enough.

Don't confuse not having seen it with it not existing; Rich revealed years later the stealth fighters were all set to bomb Libya but were held back as not being an important enough target to risk revealing the tech. We saw them in Gulf War 1.

Similarly, the tech we're describing may simply not have been deployed, in hiding until there is a "target" worth the risk of discovery.

Last edited Sat Mar 17, 2012, 02:56 PM - Edit history (2)

The fact is, the verifiable events we've been seeing in recent years are all readily explainable by known technology. For example, the spectacular laminar separation "bursts" observed in the contrail flow of the vehicle seen over China were the same as illustrated in NASA-released documents of airflow at Mach 7 over the X-37 fuselage. The X-15 and sub-orbital missiles also travel at this speed, the only real difference is that this is a lifting body with an airbreathing engine that extends the burn period and range of its powered flight path.

Same principle of known science also applies to computational technologies. There's no revolution on the horizon for CT/IT - after having billions of dollars thrown at them for decades, the "revolution" is over in both military fields. While huge black budgets continue to be thrown at these things, the usable technology payoff isn't very great, but the returns to investors of the companies this supports certainly are.

The hypersonic space plane concept is very 1950s tech, and had it not been for the sheer "bang for the buck" of missiles as opposed to a continuation of manned bomber programs, we would have seen some variation on the 1958 "Superhustler"/FISH concept by the time the SR-71 arrived:



&w=550&h=347&ei=2dhkT9XJFdL0sQLQ35i3Dw&zoom=1&iact=rc&dur=72&sig=107518354675308970884&page=1&tbnh=100&tbnw=158&start=0&ndsp=21&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0&tx=103&ty=58

By the 1970s, even the Russians were going to punk down the giga-rubles to develop their own fleet of hypersonic Buran space shuttle/fighter/interceptor/surveillance planes:



But, then, their empire crashed, as is ours, now. So, see, no real surprises here. Just misspent funds and expensive toys for Big Brother.

I have no doubt what the intel community has is amazing. Wired had a good article on the possibility Lockheed Martin has fully functioning quantum computers right now, but we just don't know, and won't for awhile. But what I am willing to bet they haven't fully mastered is the mysteries of the brain... I'm not talking about being able to correlate brain wave patterns and thoughts or any of the superficial stuff, I'm talking about the real core fundamental structures that enable human thought. So the ideal is still the product produced by nature, the yet uncopied ideal is still the human brain.

That said, I point you to the amazing story of Kim Peek, the savant who the movie "Rain Man" was based on. This man was able to memorize entire phonebooks by reading them once, but was unable to function at a basic adult level in society. Given the fact that eidetic memory would clearly offer an evolutionary advantage to those who had it did it not impair other function, I think its safe to say his genius and dysfunction were different aspects of the same thing: When you hold on to too much data, making wise decisions off it becomes impossible - so the brain of functional people is actually programmed to discard large amounts of meaningless data (like all the numbers on a phone book page you saw) and work with the data that's actually relevant. The brain has evolved to do this because its effective to favor extensive synthesis off a small set of highly relevant facts than it is to favor retention of large amounts of irrelevant facts. And once you accept the general truth of that last statement, it becomes clear: However awesome the tech the intel community has, the most effective tech will nevertheless be the tech that is using its vast computing resources like a functional human brain: exploring the myriad possibilities synthesized from the most relevant facts rather than focusing on retaining and searching over vast amounts of data.

In other words, knowing what's important to know is more important than knowing everything, even for a supercomputer.

that my dish sponge has been watching me...

Most of what they want to "know" isn't knowledge in any real sense, it's feelings and contingent opinions. No matter how smart the software at deducing this stuff, you give it to people and they're still useless twits at acting on it.

The software will, all by itself, be able to stifle all dissent LONG before it will be able to explain to mere humans why an opinion is dissenting when another one is not.

Otherwise, your complaint is simply a case of pissing into wind and complaining about getting wet.