General Discussion

bemildred

(90,061 posts)

36. Yes, no doubt.

Sat Aug 17, 2013, 02:53 PM

Aug 2013

The problem is the Pentagon, in it's wisdom, rarely pays much attention to feasibility issues when spending money, vast sums have been spent on software and hardware that sits in warehouses or on obsolete media doing nothing, and which never ever did do anything except pass the fake acceptance test they ran for it.

So while i have no doubt they will piss the money away, I have lots of doubts about whether it will ever do anything useful, or what they intend, if you see.

And as I said, from a theoretical standpoint, bigger data means slower. This is one reason I think these guys are fools. They should be trying to MINIMIZE the size of the data sets they have to go through. This is naive, technically, what they are doing.

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How does "data may be queried only when there is a reasonable suspicion" = 20 million/month? [View all] dkf Aug 2013 OP

Back in June, I wasn't that far off in my upper estimate of NSA profiling of 90 million callers/mo. leveymg Aug 2013 #1

For scale, a couple decades ago their were about 1 billion domestic phone calls per day FarCenter Aug 2013 #13

Thank you.nt pnwmom Aug 2013 #42

Could it be "Super low bar on 'reasonable suspicion?' " DirkGently Aug 2013 #2

How many analysts do they have that determine reasonable suspicion? dkf Aug 2013 #4

The system is largely automated. The profiling software determines who's call gets assigned to an leveymg Aug 2013 #6

Problem with "standards" applied without scrutiny is DirkGently Aug 2013 #7

Looking at the math they'd need 427 actual analysts dickthegrouch Aug 2013 #56

Cause the queries to suspission ratio could be 1 supect to n number of queries but I'm sure uponit7771 Aug 2013 #3

Well you're right about one thing... ljm2002 Aug 2013 #34

and that's only Ft. Meade headquarters and nearby facilities. liberal_at_heart Aug 2013 #5

Good point. nt Demo_Chris Aug 2013 #8

The definition of "reasonable suspicion" equates to "breathing"? Yo_Mama Aug 2013 #9

Bingo. Th1onein Aug 2013 #58

You are now under suspicion dkf. signed the NSA PowerToThePeople Aug 2013 #10

The thought has occurred. Scary. dkf Aug 2013 #11

They can query foreign communications data a hundred million times a month if they want. randome Aug 2013 #12

Sure if they can separate that out...which we both know they can't. dkf Aug 2013 #15

Huh? Of course they can. randome Aug 2013 #19

No they guess at the "foreignness". If it were that precise they wouldn't have any US data. dkf Aug 2013 #21

That doesn't mean 20 million people gollygee Aug 2013 #14

Doesn't each query touch the entire database? dkf Aug 2013 #16

What does that have to do with anything? gollygee Aug 2013 #17

No...each message is data in the universe. dkf Aug 2013 #18

No gollygee Aug 2013 #22

I work with databases all the time. dkf Aug 2013 #24

I also work with databases gollygee Aug 2013 #25

Isn't that the "backdoor loophole" Wyden has been speaking of? dkf Aug 2013 #27

I don't think that is how it works. Very inefficient for one thing, and efficiency matters a lot. nt bemildred Aug 2013 #20

How else would a query work. It obviously needs a specified universe. dkf Aug 2013 #23

I don't know what the NSA does, or any spooks, but I know a good deal about databases. bemildred Aug 2013 #26

Which is why the government is at the forefront in developing ways to handle uber data. dkf Aug 2013 #28

Right, massive parallelism can help, but only with partitionable queries. bemildred Aug 2013 #31

True, but cross link a name, IP address, email, phone #s, etc together and isn't that one query? dkf Aug 2013 #35

Again I don't know, but if it was me ... bemildred Aug 2013 #38

Okay I hear you...I run (and must sometimes debug) several custom SQL programs dkf Aug 2013 #44

Please see post #41, I think that's the point. bemildred Aug 2013 #46

Like I posted earlier, they were using it in Iraq to predict attacks and I imagine unrest. dkf Aug 2013 #48

That's what they claim. So you believe them now? nt bemildred Aug 2013 #50

Originally I didn't understand why this would be of interest in times of chaos. dkf Aug 2013 #53

It's pretty messy. bemildred Aug 2013 #54

Your partioning point is a good one. randome Aug 2013 #29

Yes, I used to just wallow in this stuff, back in the 80s and 90s. nt bemildred Aug 2013 #32

Also this: NSA establishes $60 million data analytics lab at NC State Published: August 15, 2013 Up dkf Aug 2013 #30

Yes, no doubt. bemildred Aug 2013 #36

Well we both know many advances have been made through defense research. dkf Aug 2013 #37

This is computing theory, performance theory, it's math. Finite math. They aren't going to fix it. bemildred Aug 2013 #39

Unfortunately they found in Iraq that the more data they added the better the predictive capability dkf Aug 2013 #40

That's not math, is it? bemildred Aug 2013 #41

No...they were using it to predict things too. dkf Aug 2013 #45

Well, I have to go, nice chat. nt bemildred Aug 2013 #47

Yes! Appreciate it. dkf Aug 2013 #49

The algos they use in the US probably track the Dow. The CIA has been working on this sort of thing leveymg Aug 2013 #51

If so that puts a new spin on Fed actions. dkf Aug 2013 #55

I'm sure until recently, anyway, the point has been to stay well away from red lines. leveymg Aug 2013 #57

That is an excellent question... ljm2002 Aug 2013 #33

Greenwald, Ron Paul, ACLU Bad! Spying Good NoOneMan Aug 2013 #43

I thought it was explained pretty well in the article bhikkhu Aug 2013 #52