<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office>
- are alive and well.
And we shouldn't be surprised.
The dream of inescapable monitoring is far too seductive to die an easy death. Governments have probably lusted after "total" surveillance since the dawn of the golden age of humans, evolution's special talking death monkeys.
But what's different this time? Why are we seeing this sort of thing popping up again and again now?
One tempting answer (and the one Dem partisans might toss out as a way of distinguishing their party's TV packaged magical meme product from that of their competitors') is that the Bush administration is uniquely obsessed with secrecy and information gathering. And no doubt, the Busheviks are unusually attracted to detention, "intelligence gathering",
secrecy and bellicosity, even by the already neurotic standards of the post WW2 national security state.
But there's a little lower layer worth considering.
Nowadays, when we aren't speaking face to face we speak via electronics - and not just "electronics" but digital electronics. We often talk about digital this and digital that but we rarely appreciate the implications of our digital life. These implications include the ability to intercept, analyze and store information - audio, visual, textual, etc - on an unprecedented scale.
Of the three capabilities listed above, storage is the most important to to understand as we reflect on why agencies such as the NSA can not only imagine, but accomplish their gargantuan surveillance objectives.
Fact is, we now have the ability to store an infinite amount of digital information. We can (and do) create vast farms of hard disk drives, arranged in storage area networks (SANs) and other, even more exotic configurations enabling us to scale our storage needs without limit.
The same technology that enables Google to offer two gigabytes (and counting! as their ads remind us) of storage for email allows the NSA to not only record, but retain, for no set time and with no physical limit, intercepted electronically conveyed conversations.
This capability will only improve over time.
But there's no need to take my clumsly word for it. Princeton's Ed Felton discusses this issue in great detail at his blog, "Freedom to Tinker".
Felton writes:
The revelation that the National Security Agency has been wiretapping communications crossing the U.S. border (and
possibly within the U.S.), without warrants, has started many angry conversations across the country, and rightly so. Here is an issue that challenges our most basic conception of the purposes of government and its relation to citizens.
Today I am starting a series of posts about this issue. Most discussions of the wiretap program focus on two questions:
(1) Is the program legal? and (2) Regardless of its legality, does the program, as currently executed, serve our national interest (bearing in mind the national interest in both national security and citizens’ privacy)? These questions are surely important, but I want to set them aside here. I’m setting aside the legal question because it’s outside my expertise. I’m setting aside any evaluation of the current program for two reasons. First, we don’t know the exact scope of the current wiretap program. Second, most people — on both sides — think the second question is an easy one, and easy questions lead to boring conversations.
I want to focus instead on the more basic questions of what the extent of national security wiretapping should be, and why. The why question is especially important.
The first thing to realize is that this is not your parents’ wiretap debate. Though the use (and sometimes misuse) of wiretapping has long been a contentious issue, the terms of the debate have changed. I’m not referring here to the claim that 9/11 changed everything. What I mean is that wiretapping technology has changed in ways that ought to reframe the debate.
Two technology changes are important. The first is the dramatic drop in the cost of storage, making it economical to record vast amounts of communications traffic. The second technology change is the use of computer algorithms to analyze intercepted communications. Traditionally, a wiretap would be heard (or read) immediately by a person, or recorded for
later listening by a person. Today computer algorithms can sift through intercepted communications, looking for sophisticated patterns, and can select certain items to be recorded or heard by a person.
[...]
full -
<http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1012>
.d.
--------- Folks, if you're like me, you're constantly running from Mexican bandits who're after that diamond you got hidden somewhere on your body.
Olly