NSA Agent: "Sir why did you do a search of "Freedom and Liberty"?

Average Joe: "Because I love America"

NSA: *Talks into radio on shoulder* "Sir you're going to have to come with us."

Again crazy world.

Still doing a mass search for all those key worlds by alot of people, thousands if not millions of people would mess with them, if it is all the time even more so. It seems like it would be something slactivists would be all over doing, it is easy as clicking like on a Facebook page.

The odd thing is I am not one for protests lol. But this just seems like a no-brainer.

Reminds me of Terry Pratchett's Night Watch where several soldiers became convinced that a group of people had to be traitors because they were singing the national anthem.

EDIT: Unrelated note - what are you guys more worried about? The government spying on people, or George Clooney spying on people?

I do know, to within an epsilon and delta. I can show you the unfavorable statistics for any and all numbers less than that if you so wish. Each one is unfavorable.

I didn't imply you are wrong. I said outright you are wrong. I also didn't say you were wrong because you didn't understand an unrelated example. I said you were wrong because it appears you lack a firm grasp of the field of statistics, and then used an example to point out how that's not uncommon because statistics often goes against common sense, and that I was thusly unsurprised that you lacked a firm grasp on statistics.

I don't have to since that's not strictly true and also racial profiling is illegal.

I never said anything about being scarred emotionally. I said economic, privacy, and social costs. Nothing about emotional costs.

I will never forgive the admins for removing the roll eyes emoticon.

We do this system exactly for the opposite reason why we have the automated terrorist search system in place: we value letting an innocent man stay free over convicting a guilty man. THat's the exact opposite of these terrorist systems. As such, it's a cost we shoulder as a social collective because we see the cost as being worth it. That is not the case with these automated systems which violate "innocent until proven guilty" on a fundamental level.

There is only three variables to account for: pool size, target size, and error rate. The large pool size, the small amount of terrorists in he US, and the fact that there is an error rate associated with every automated system makes it the case with an absolute probabilistic unfavorable outcome.


But it's not limited to arbitrary factors. The base line fallacy is PROVEN EMPIRICALLY to ALWAYS exist whenever you have ANY large pool from which you are drawing samples where the target is only a small percentage.

Not what I replied to and you know it.

I'm terribly sorry but I don't play these kind of games, find another svcker.

I do however call people out on it.

I was not trying to play a gotcha game with you, Merari. I apologize if it seemed that way. That was indeed what I was trying to say, although my wording may not have properly communicated that. Being imprecise in my language is one of my many sins.

Ditto. It was so useful. And also expressive.

Black people made up 28% of all arrests in 2011 despite being only 12% of the population. Statistics are fun! :wheee:

But this was all assumption on your part. I was familiar with your common misconception, thereby disproving your tangential argument.

Assuming only one terrorist in the 3,000 is an arbitrary factor that does not translate literally into real life, therefor the experiment does not accurately model real life, unless 3,000 people entering parliament are rounded up and one of them is a terrorist. The experiment also assumes that terrorists are only identified with a single data point, which is also (God I hope) not what happens in real life. Thus, the experiments relevance to the topic at hand is low, because an unknown set of data points (at least 2) was used to find an unknown amount of terrorists. EDIT: The accuracy is also unknown (unless the NSA wants to share. I doubt it. )

Put it another way: how many layers of redundancy does it take to refine the margin of error until it is within a level of usefulness? Can you prove that the NSA is not using that many layers of redundancy?

So these people are in jail now? I thought they were merely questioned, and not convicted. Just like the criminal justice system.

You said their lives were ruined. How, exactly is that true based on the factors that you mentioned?

No worries we all have our fair share of personality flaws, I know I certainly do.

The ability for George Clooney to spy on people is incredibly limited in scope and purpose. The amount of damage George Clooney's spying can do is also limited.

Due to the size and power of the government, their ability to spy is great in scope and has the ability to be incredibly pervasive. The ability for the government (or, more likely: a subset of government officials) to do damage with what they learn on spying is great. The chance of someone profiting from it is also great.

Snowden was able to get all sorts of information he shouldn't have and then leak it. Who is to say that another person working in the government doesn't steal information on citizens and doe heinous things with it? It's already an overused trope in Hollywood for government officials to abuse their positions to get information on another person going down to the lowly DMV official. As power and information increase, the incentives for doing things also does. Absolute power corrupting absolutely, and whatnot.

As such, the government wins. Which is not to say I would allow for someone like George Clooney to spy on me, and I definitely wouldn't allow it to happen silently.

Of course there is a way to avoid all the spying and that is to simply not use the internet. Also isn't the internet technically under the governments control anyways? I mean they control the radios and tv, and other radio frequencies. Pretty much if it is a signal and it goes through the air, the government has defacto control if not outright control over it. Am I wrong on that?

Just go back to good old pen and paper and use the post office, they need the business lol. Support the Post Office and piss off the NSA at the sametime. Win win lol.

Currently. Technological advances could allow this to become more widespread. Plus, there are already tons of corporate satellites up there. How carefully are we monitoring what they are doing?

Not really, no. Who owns the internet is a touchy subject.

He is currently using his powers to spy on a terrorist and warn people when the guy is coming. Is this a power for good? Or is it bad that this guy's rights might be being broken?

EDIT: I have no idea what Sudan and Nigeria have to say in their laws about getting spied on from space by an actor in another nation. It doesn't seem like something that would come up very often.

But didn't the governments of the world, at least Canada and the United States take control of the airwaves back when it was discovered that we can send messages through the air?

Didn't the states ban Short Wave radio sometime after the Titianic sank. I just know in Canada the government controls who gets to provide internet, they control who can have a TV or radio station and do on and so on. Seems to me that have defacto control all ready.

But that doesn't mean they can spy on everyone, but if they shut down the internet providers for not doing what they want.. again defacto control.

Still I am just shooting from the hip on this.

No matter what level Joe Schmoe reaches, he won't be able to tap every single ISP in the country. He wouldn't be able to force other companies to give him access to their data, etc.

Plus, as conventional spying techniques of Joe Schmoe goes up, so does the ability of your average citizen to avoid those methods of spying. What separates the government is the huge disparity between your average person and the government's power, money, intelligence, scope, and technology. Normal people are much more evenly matched.

Excruciatingly carefully. Every non-government satellite as well as pretty much every government satellite is extremely well monitored both by civilian and government groups alike. Even our own government's "spy satellites" are pretty well known in terms of position and capabilities at any given time.

This is partially out of necessity (otherwise the satellite system wouldn't function), and partially out of mistrust between organizations and governments (a sort of MAD if you would).

Saw this on the front page of Reddit when I got home from work.

Honestly, I think it is just a bunch of [comment seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Department]

The government does regulate airwave usage. I will defer to DEFRON on the subject of what control the government has over internet providers.

Yeah, that's what I meant....... (<--Should be rolling eyes emoticon but....)

OMG, they did!!

What do you want? We have a due process of law that follows a certain set of procedures. There is no way to make it infallible, but we have set it up in the best way we can. For those who are innocent and do go through their due process and still end up getting convicted, it svcks, but the only way we could have prevented it at this point would be to not put them on trial.

So long as the NSA continues to act within the due process of law, what else do you want? For them not to try to protect people?

It was already broken long ago by complacence and apathy. What 9/11 did was give political bullies carte blanche to violate peoples' rights unchallenged. All they needed was a passable excuse and that gave them one.

I thought this would be about unexpected search results.

I once google image searched for pool sticks. I think this was before they implemented SafeSearch filtering. The first result was one of the most depraved NSFW images I had ever seen.

Oh dear.

To be able to search for common household products without a knock at my door implying I am a criminal?

That's putting it mildly. Put yourself in their shoes.

Do they though?

Well, yeah, but what are you going to do? They went through a system that is set up to give them so many chances that often guilty men go free and were still wronged. That is bad luck on a grand scale. What else can we, as fallible beings, do?

They are obtaining a court order to allow them to collect data, so yes, they are within the bounds of current laws. The only way to change this (because Congress is not going to) is to challenge the constitutionality of the law that allows them to do this, and I assure you, that process is always in the works.

Atleast they left the WTF?! smilie

I've read pretty much everything you have been posting and I can't help but say.....

BBBBWAHAHAHAHAHA!

All that says is that black people get arrested more. Nothing more. That's actually exactly the bending of statistics that Samuel Clemens hated. Unlike what you're doing right now, I've given you every bit of information you need to verify my statistics. Instead you just say "Nope. statistics don't transfer to the real world".

So far you've not shown a great understanding of statistics, judging from your statements about how statistics don't transfer to reality when they do.

Wait... Maybe this is the problem. You're using the BBCs specific theoretical scenario instead of the actual concept? The BBC just made up numbers to show it off. You seemed to have gotten stuck on their numbers instead of the facts that the US population is huge, there are errors in automated systems, and that the number of terrorists in the US make up the tiniest of fractions of the whole US population.

If you were to take a random sample of the US (which is what the automated systems do), apply a probabilistic method for detecting a target (which is what's being done by the terrorist-searching algorithms), and the target makes up a tiny fraction of the population, the result is more false positives (like the OP) and true positives.

Too many, and all at the expense of taxpayer dollars. It's wasting resources.

The OP happens on a regular basis and the FBI's known terrorist list doesn't get names taken off of it often.

Innocent until proven guilty works as such:

Evidence suggest person is guilty -> research/surveillance done to find out if they are

These automated sysems work as such:

There is a chance you are a terroist -> research/surveillance done -> Interrogation based on evidence that under any other circumstances and just a mere decade ago would have been illegal is undertaken

That second one is presumed guilt, not presumed innocence.

There is a social stigmata to this, their taxpayer money is being wasted, society as a whole is hurt by such suspicions, etc. In this respect it's not very different from the red scare.

9/11 tupac mlk etc etc

Illuminati vision is the opposite of the icon they choose to idolize, kind of how the nazis took a symbol and make it their own too

The feeling is mutual, I assure you.

@Defron, this whole argument is horsehockey anyway, because the NSA didn't tip authorities off to these people, the husband's employer did. From the NYPD:

Seems people got all in a tiff over nothing. Blame the NSA!