I see this thing about Prism and the Echelon system before that is still rumbling on.
It shows just how ridiculous this "war on terror" is. We're spending multibillions of dollars to fight a bunch of primitive clowns that don't have an army, navy, or air force, or a clue
Did you see the terrorists who got convicted this week, they intended to bomb an EDL rally with a nail bomb made out of a firework, got there 2 hours late then got stopped on the M1 in the way back home for not having valid car insurance.
So two guys in a Volvo V70 were more effective than the Utah data centre.
Computer intelligence only works if they understand the vagaries of humanity and what they are looking for – inhumanity. What a waste of storage full of facebook duck face and pictures of food.
I think the debate will continue past "Everybody's a target; everybody with communication is a target" and move on to ROI (return on investment) on tens of billions spent – it seems like contractors are in control of this and not elected bodies.
I think you have to say that with more and more Americans falling below the poverty line is this money well spent?
It’s quite obvious that “total information awareness" is a fallacy, and if this is not regulated, it is logical to presume that big business can buy can buy diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications.
information has a value, we know this from Facebook.
Is it just possible that there is a price list and you can just buy information by knowing the right people and handing your credit card over to Menwith Hill – “That will be £10,000 or would you like a full work up for £25,000”
There little or no indication that this policies effectiveness has improved in over a decade. In business there is the 80/20 rule. Maybe they don’t understand that.
Is the largest, most covert and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created an ineffective failure – I would think they don’t have much longer to prove themselves.
This won’t be decided on morality, it will be done based on what is understood in business – the bottom line and US $
So for the time being jihadists are safe because on the whole they are under the radar. And we are safe because of their idiotic attempts to execute an attack. We just have to be thankful that they are so disorganised. A computer can’t understand ridiculousness embedded in the world of extremism unless they get the Utah super computers to read the Koran and then very slightly tilt its head to the left.
From our point of view, you are more likely to get struck by lightning or win the lottery 3 weeks in a row. Once we take that on board the expenditure looks even more excessive.
It will all sort itself out in the end as anyone who wants to run the world under Sharia law, will soon find out that his wife won’t let him and after the next election congress will pull the purse strings after they review the contractor’s invoices.
Bell Helicopters and Vietnam anyone?
Follow up
ReplyDelete4 plots a year
US surveillance foiled 50 plots, says spy chief Alexander National Security Agency director Gen Keith Alexander on Capitol Hill in Washington on 18 June 2013 It was the NSA chief's second visit to Congress since the snooping programmes emerged Continue reading the main story
We still have a few questions on cost viability here, firstly that number is since 2001, but forgive me if I am wrong but didn’t start in 2006 onwards (The New York Times disclosed the existence of this effort in 2005. In 2006, former AT&T technician Mark Klein revealed that the company had allowed the NSA) – so that’s
4 ‘plots’ a year.
Microsoft, some call it "Hoovering" — not after the vacuum cleaner, but after J. Edgar Hoover, the first FBI director, who gathered dirt on countless people.
This frenetic, manual process was the forerunner to Prism, the recently revealed highly classified National Security Agency program that seizes records from Internet companies. As laws changed and technology improved, the government and industry moved toward a streamlined, electronic process, which required less time from the companies and provided the government data in a more standard format.
Since at least the early 1970s, the NSA has been tapping foreign cables. It doesn't need permission. Under civil rights, it should do, but that’s is how it perceives its job.
So let’s get back to 4 plots a year and the costs of the data centre are alleged to be $20 million.
A figure of $20 million sound like an accountant has been tampering with the figures. It’s a 1 million square foot data centre, but comparison the energy bill alone will be around $40 million per year (excluding 6% energy tax, we presume the govt would advocate paying taxes = $2.4 million) . So it looks like it time to sack the accountant. If we say energy costs are 10% of running costs, the annual bill is $400 million = $100 million per plot excluding the $1.5 billion construction costs
And the accountant may have forgotten ‘section 702’ – that says Google, Facebook and the other 10+ companies can expect compensating for their troubles.
Beware the humble contractor