Sleepycatz

Billions and Billions

Yesterday, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell offered some enlightening and frightening testimony before the judiciary committee. McConnell testified to what a number of us have been for years:

[the] Director of National Intelligence acknowledged that the terror attacks of Sept. 11, which he invoked to justify expanding US spy powers, “could have been prevented” under existing laws if intelligence agencies had “connected the dots” in analyzing intelligence.

That’s right, there was no real need for the Patriot Act, FISA revisions, or the myriad of other ‘enhancements’ to surveillance laws to prevent another 9/11. Those events could have been prevented but for the incompetence of the agencies involved. Instead, we have provided the alphabet soup of security agencies with more unfettered access to our personal data. Has this made us more secure? Well, the numbers suggest that perhaps we are less secure.

When questioned about the number of Americans currently under surveillance, McConnell responded: “It’s a very small number considering that there are billions of transactions [intercepted] every day.” Let us consider this for a moment: if the agencies are intercepting billions of transactions a day how can these be processed? Assuming that McConnell was engaging in some hyperbole, let’s assume 1bn transactions a day. Throw away 50 percent for obvious misses, and assume an average of 10 seconds to review and classify a transaction (a very generous average, given translation time) would mean that it would take 155.5 man years (56,757.5 days) to review one day’s collection of data. This enormous amount of data, obviously, cannot be properly analyzed, so they are simply collecting and storing it for future reference and correlation. This suggests that quality of intelligence data has simply been replaced by quantity. So the odds of actually preventing an event are actually less then they were prior to this massive collection simply due to the volume that needs to be plowed through. In other words: analysts would be unable to “connect the dots”, because the dot are buried in mounds of background noise.

McConnell, and his supporters, though keep insisting that huge amounts of data collection is necessary to prevent an attack. If the data was there prior to 9/11 to prevent that attack and could not be analyzed properly, how can exponentially more data be handled to prevent an attack? It can’t . For the supporters of the security state the entire debate is really about pushing acceptance of wholesale government surveillance not about useful intelligence gathering.

This entry was posted by steve on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.