In an interview with the BBC, Glenn Greenwald brings up a subject which, curiously, is almost never raised: the NSA has a staggering accomplishment under its collective belt: the creation of a global security state that can scoop up or read or listen in on just about any conversation on the planet. This is a form of global omniscience previously almost unimagined. Only one problem: maybe computer algorithms can deal with the billions and billions of “conversations” in the NSAs possession at any time, but human beings can’t. This kind of overload is technologically remarkable, but in “intelligence” terms little short of idiotic. Here’s Greenwald as summarized by the BBC on the subject. Tom “After the attacks of 9/11 the US government concluded it didnt know enough, journalist Glenn Greenwald told BBCs World News America on Wednesday. In reality, it knew too much. ‘The point of 9/11 was that the US government failed to detect the plot,’ he said. ‘Not because they hadnt collected enough, but that they collected so much that they didnt even know the meaning of what they had.’ “The US government response was not just to collect more intelligence, Greenwald said, but to ‘collect everything.’ That, he added, created a problem: ‘When youre collecting billions of calls and emails every day, which is what theyre collecting, its almost impossible to detect people who are planning an attack on the Boston Marathon or to explode a plane above Detroit on Christmas day. It becomes overwhelming.’” bbc/news/blogs-echochambers-27419161
Posted on: Sat, 17 May 2014 11:58:21 +0000