Ten Reasons Why All Americans Should Fear and Loathe NSA Data-Mining

From SusanG at dailykos, in response to the ABC poll citing mass apathy about the USA Today story:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/5/12/123644/354

1. It's inefficient. As networking analyst Valdis Krebs said, as reported on defensetech.org, "If you're looking for a needle, making the haystack bigger is counterintuitive. It just doesn't make sense."

2. It's costly. It is, according to William M. Arkin of the Washington Post, a "multi-billion dollar program, which began before 9/11 but has been accelerated since then." An exact cost, of course, will never be pinned down because it's operating in the shadows. But it's safe to assume with this administration's track record that it's in mind-blowing, borrowed from your great-grandchildren funding territory.

3. It's been lied about. Repeatedly. This fact alone should give pause to all Americans. Common sense should tell us that you only lie if you suspect you're doing something wrong; otherwise, come clean on the extent of the program and justify it to citizens. We can live without details of specific operations that would alert the "evil-doers." But we should not be asked to accept this level of intrustion without a full - and truthful from the beginning - account of who is being spied upon and why.

4. It's illegal, according to constitutional scholars. And last time I checked, the president was not above the law. Setting a precedent of approved lawbreaking by any citizen - no matter how powerful - is bad for the nation.

5. The information is not only available to the government, but to all the subcontractors involved in the program, which Arkin estimates is at least more than 100. What level of employees at each subcontracting company has access to your records and could sell the data is unknown because there is no oversight of the program.

6. Given the state of one-party rule in this country, in which lobbyists write their own legislation (warning: PDF) and the president signs it, it seems not unlikely this data is being shared with corporations. Letting health insurers know how often you call your doctor, your pharmacy, your physical therapist, your mental health counselor seems ripe for a situation of coverage denial.

7. Businesses should worry that logging of phone calls to, say, a company under consideration for buy-out would be shared with a bigger GOP donor who is a competitor. Same with R & D research. Same for calls to limousine services and hookers.

8. Given the fact that it's being touted as the largest database in the world, it's highly unlikely we're simply talking about logs of phone calls made. It's probably not targeting just who you called and who called you. Emails, instant messaging and text messaging are also possible data being tracked, according to AP.

9. Blackmail opportunities are ripe. Government employees, politicians, employees of subcontractors - all could conceivably have information, not necessarily on you, but on ... say ... your Congressional rep that would guarantee votes and legislation not in your best interest.

10. It's "un-American." This level of spying is just gut-level creepy, especially since there's no oversight. When people and agencies as disparate as Joe Scarborough, the ACLU and the conservative Chicago Tribune are up in arms together, there's something wrong at the basic level with such a program, and it's crying out for oversight.

1. The muti-billion dollar contracts are making bush cronies RICH!

2.What better way to always be a step ahead and have the goods on political enemies who could be a threat to your power?

I repeat, THE NSA DATA COLLECTION HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH TERRA!

on some of the people in Congress. I think that it's likely that this is one of the tools that they have used in order to generate the lock step within their own party, but how else could they have turned Lieberman into their party mascot?

It just makes me wonder at some of the things that have happened is D.C. in the last few years.

Blackmail ran the government back then. Some of the impotence of legislators had a lot to do with their file at the FBI and the information collected back then had no DNA, much less phone usage, no NSA super tech, etc. And the e-voting is Digital Chicago Graveyard. So crippling is this e-Stazi atmosphere that we forget this has been an ingrained inertia for many decades. So much so that blackmail threats orr even consciousness of such things are not needed as much anymore. People are compliant because that guy is compliant because that hero did nothing- because someone owns the skeleton in his closet.

Billions of dollars and not a single terrorist !!
It's either the stupidest boondoggle in history
or it is for some other (political) purpose.

its so reich wing.

these people can not be stopped I am afraid. :(

Instead of clear, written, published laws that tell you specifically what behavior is illegal, we have entered the market-research world of data mining, where statistical correlation between lifestyle factors is what attracts attention.

It's no longer what you do, it's now who you are.

It's not "did this person break a law", it's "does this person share interests with other people we don't like"

This is inherent in data mining. It is why data mining is so useful to marketers. It is why data mining should never be used for law enforcement.

data mining can show statistically likely times and locations for
crimes, that police can better target resources to the hotspots.

I've spent years working with data mining tools, and designing
data mining systems for market forcasting. It is possible to, using
opaque methods, train a neural net to look for certain signal-firing
patterns that might betray a likey future event. It works for
forcasting in the bond markets, as i got paid hansomely for it.

Surely the principals of foreasting are not so different, just
the legality of having the data there at all is the problem, even
if nohuman being could make any sense of it, the huge set of data,
is likely a training set, less for working out nodal-relationships,
and more as a pre-registered pattern engine already incorporating all
the genetic patterns of future events.

As a computer scientist, i disagree with you totally. These technologies
are very powerful tools to enable a civil society. As a citizen, i
am equally incensed that they have been given private data and are
organizing searches counter to the law and teh constitution. A
democratic administration would be no less interested in using IT
technology to fight terrorism... baby.. bath water...

you aren't using data mining to identify specific individuals in the application cited. The use of data mining by the NSA *is* intended to do this.

The intent of data mining in the private sector to to identify "lifestyles" then use those to target advertising effort. You transpose that to law enforcement and you have the state identifying "bad" lifestyles that create "targets" if not actual suspects.

It's no longer the case that your criminal actions cause you to be placed under suspicion - it is the whole complex of your purchases, livelihood, demographics, etc. that do so.

Instead of "I am free to do what I want as long as I break no law", the rule becomes "I need to look like an innocent person". Instead of "stop that person because I have probably cause", it becomes "Stop that person because they act funny"

I have an MS in Computer Science, BTW and have been working in this field for 20 years. I totally disagree with you too.

And you indeed paint the bottom of where they can go. I figured
that they already went there decades ago. I coulda done that with an ibm mainframe
with DB2 long ago, as signalling data was never the state secret it is today, perhaps we were
just naieve with the data in those switches. The long line companies have had
nationwide data for decades now to do this with... all those computers in fort meade.
Heck, like in that film "enemy of the states."

My treasury forecasting system, using expert system based opaque forecasting
used a series of moving averages of different periods on certain hundreds world
indicies/forex collected from tick market data. Using short term forcasting, 1 hour and 1/2 hour,
was extremely directionall accurate, less so in magnitudes of prediction. In trading,
it performed well with an experienced trader, in NY, Bahamas and Chicago.

I don't believe computers have any place in police work. I agree with you
in this point. My view of police, is to get them out there in to the
community to get to know people directly, that through engagement, we ahve
a civil society. But with the drugs laws as they stand, that is impossible,
as the poilice in the community as they are a living threat to millions of poeple.

IN that sense, i am for total privacy, and a constitutional amendment for absolute
privacy of a citizen in all matters financial and electronic, that only via
warrant can the virtual house of the 4th amendment be searched.

Ps.
Police systems using fuzzy-policing have proven very effective and solving
crimes in Vancouver, but such systems use only demographic data.

I imagine the NSA's dream database has all the bank accounts, all the people
on earth, their telephones, and a link between all the bank accounts and the telephones.
Then they will use it to destroy the economics of their opponents and we will
and the opposition will die like the disciples of christ, fucked and screwed.

But they are but playing out Saint Nixon's last postmortem act of vengence.

At least, not the Americans I know from the past.

Theyve become fat and lazy and sheeplike.

I agree with your ten reasons but youre preaching to the choir here. Most of us here at DU are the last of a dying breed imo.

blow-job yet others disagree. I don't get it!!!