You know the scariest thing about this? It’s not that the FBI is merely incompetent. It is that, apparently, so many American Muslims in sensitive positions make contact with Al Qaeda that the FBI is forced to conduct investigatory triage and evaluate whether, in their minds, the emails are merely innocent-for-now banter or something demanding a more urgent response.
Otherwise, why the blow-off? I don’t understand how the FBI could possibly deem any chatter with Al Qaeda harmless and not worth investigating unless so much of this was going on that they had decide which illegal chatter with a hot-war enemy was worth their limited let’s-take-a-looksie-at-this resources.
Ace, “FBI: Hassan’s Al Qaeda Emails Were Probably Just Some Research and Social Chatter and Stuff”, Ace of Spades, 2009-11-10
November 10, 2009
QotD: “It’s not that the FBI is merely incompetent”
September 23, 2009
Information is data, but data is not information
Wired obtained several hundred pages of information through a Freedom of Information Act query relating to internal surveillance of Americans by the FBI — including information from hotels, car rental agencies, and at least one department store chain:
A fast-growing FBI data-mining system billed as a tool for hunting terrorists is being used in hacker and domestic criminal investigations, and now contains tens of thousands of records from private corporate databases, including car-rental companies, large hotel chains and at least one national department store, declassified documents obtained by Wired.com show.
Headquartered in Crystal City, Virginia, just outside Washington, the FBI’s National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) maintains a hodgepodge of data sets packed with more than 1.5 billion government and private-sector records about citizens and foreigners, the documents show, bringing the government closer than ever to implementing the “Total Information Awareness” system first dreamed up by the Pentagon in the days following the Sept. 11 attacks.
Such a system, if successful, would correlate data from scores of different sources to automatically identify terrorists and other threats before they could strike. The FBI is seeking to quadruple the known staff of the program.
The last paragraph needs a bit of analysis . . . because just adding more data won’t “automatically” do any good for domestic security or individual privacy. There was no lack of data on the 9/11 terrorists: if anything, there was too much data. Data is useless until it is corelated with other data to form actual information, a pattern of data that shows something of interest. The various intelligence-gathering arms of the US government already gather lots and lots of data, but they haven’t always been able to turn that collection of raw data into useful information . . . at least, not in a timely fashion.
Opsahl cites a October 2008 National Research Council paper that concluded that data mining is a dangerous and ineffective way to identify potential terrorists, which will inevitably generate false positives that subject innocent citizens to invasive scrutiny by their government.
At the same time, Opsahl admits the NSAC is not at the moment the Orwellian system that TIA would have been.
Those false positives may be enough to disrupt the private lives of many Americans and non-citizen residents, because everyone still has things about them they don’t particularly want to be broadcast to the world. Many employers reconsider their employees who are deemed to be “of interest” to the government, leading to potential loss of employment, diminished opportunities for promotion, or other less obvious but still negative consequences. Having “nothing to hide” is no defence . . . in fact, it may make things tougher — if they don’t find anything obvious, they may decide to dig deeper, creating more disruption.
Of course, things could always be worse: the EU is busy working towards their own Precrime database. (Obscure reference explanation.)
