Nikolai

I work closely on the federal side, and there are good people and bad. The federal side is also highly secretive, cutthroat, and concerned with its own interests. In many ways, it is much the same as any other government power, hence my invigorated skepticism in recent years.

The expansion of capabilities expands the government's real power projection.

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We get what we deserve.

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“On a day when they could have had impact players David Terrell or Koren Robinson..they took Georgia defensive tackle Richard Seymour, who had 1 sacks last season in the pass-happy SEC and is too tall to play tackle at 6-6 and too slow to play defensive end. This genius move was followed by trading out of a spot where they could have gotten the last decent receiver in Robert Ferguson and settled for tackle Matt Light, who will not help any time soon.”

Mrs.PatsFanInVa

I suppose....but the more protection we demand the more personal freedoms we have to expect to give up, don't we?

Sometimes there really is no way to completely separate the wheat from the chaff.

PatsFanInVa

Part of the discussion here hinges on a fascinating dynamic involving the multiplication of capabilities when a new capability reduces the cost.

One obvious outcome is it costs you 40K to do the work of something that costs $1.5m, so you just spend 35 (or so) times less money to do the same job. That's what simple math suggests.

What Nikolai's suspicion implies, and what will almost certainly happen, is that we take a static or growing budget number and just divide by 40k instead of by $1.5 m. Therefore surveillance of all citizens increases dramatically, which is just what's happened in the last couple of decades -- we already know about the proliferation of cameras in western societies (it's even worse in places like Britain where they've already thrown in the towel on the subject of intrusive government -- different history.)

I remember all the things they talked about in Social Studies classes in 8th grade, the "get the kids to think about important future issues" stuff.

Some of it was about running out of oil. Check. Some of it was about cyber-stalking capability because of personal information being easily available. Check. Some of it was about the capability for ubiquitous government or corporate surveillance. Check.

Too bad about that jet pack though.

The one thing they were really bad at predicting was how computers would be used... all they could imagine was that individuals with computers could use "a device called a MODE-EM (how they pronounced it)" to steal nuclear bomb secrets or something after a great deal of effort, then encode it, and using their MODE-EM, send it to another computer WITHOUT EVEN HAVING TO CARRY A FLOPPY DISC over there.

They had no idea that a sizable proportion of humanity would be within a few keystrokes of one another at all times. They never understood that when you could commercialize information sharing, the desirable trait becomes transparency, including of information you consider private.

When some digerati creep says "INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE," I always remember he means "YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE," along with everything else.

Similarly, when someone says "all them drones and cameras and whatnot ain't that bad," I just think back wi(Please be quiet - edited)lly to those days growing up in the 70s when I could walk down the street, go to this place and that place, make my brick and mortar transactions, and if I wanted to, keep it to myself (well, relatively speaking -- I did live in a small town.)

Now you just assume somebody somewhere knows exactly what you did, where you did it, and who you did it with... and you count on it not being bloody important enough to ever become "everybody's business." It's still way creepier than thinking that maybe God is tracking you 24/7, but not some computer complex in Langley or somewhere.

Christ I'm a geezer.

PS, any of you guys catch the "Masters of Science Fiction" made-for-TV flick "Little Brother"? Much more current speculation, now that 1984 has been in the rearview for almost 30 years. It'll scratch your libertarian itch... try to catch it if you get a chance.

PPS - the edited word was "W I S T F U L L Y"... God does have a sense of humor.

DarrylS

All of will generate a tremendous amount of information, who will review it all???

There are many hours per day already being generated in Afghanistan/Pakistan/Iraq, if we rely on human scrutiny there is a good chance if something happens it will be missed... so what is the point???

In active situation it may prove valuable, but in a routine situation it will probably prove unwieldy.. imagine big cities hiring a couple of hundred reviewers who will sit in some darkened room reviewing all of these videofeeds..

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"Being the best doesn't mean you always win. It just means you win more than anyone else".. tweet from Kurt Warner to Tom Brady.

Nikolai

I think Ben Franklin summed it up best with his now-famous quote. I'm not going to go with the oft-cited trope of "the terrorists win", but I will say that as we exchange freedom for perceived security, we definitely lose.

There are more creative solutions out there to address our security concerns, but they'll never gain traction among the power brokers, because...they're power brokers.

Well stated.

Isn't that the way, though? I don't want to get into a discussion about the "Anonymous" type groups, but they are not the friend of the common person.

Good post. Not a whole hell of a lot to add.

__________________
We get what we deserve.

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“On a day when they could have had impact players David Terrell or Koren Robinson..they took Georgia defensive tackle Richard Seymour, who had 1 sacks last season in the pass-happy SEC and is too tall to play tackle at 6-6 and too slow to play defensive end. This genius move was followed by trading out of a spot where they could have gotten the last decent receiver in Robert Ferguson and settled for tackle Matt Light, who will not help any time soon.”

Nikolai

You bring up a good point. There aren't enough analysts to review everything. Hell, even prior to 9/11, there weren't enough analysts to review the information based on our capabilities then.

The problem becomes more acute when you think of an unscrupulous politician or security official using these capabilities in a focused manner to target a rival, or perhaps more dramatically, a dissenter. It's not that far-fetched. It already happens.

__________________
We get what we deserve.

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“On a day when they could have had impact players David Terrell or Koren Robinson..they took Georgia defensive tackle Richard Seymour, who had 1 sacks last season in the pass-happy SEC and is too tall to play tackle at 6-6 and too slow to play defensive end. This genius move was followed by trading out of a spot where they could have gotten the last decent receiver in Robert Ferguson and settled for tackle Matt Light, who will not help any time soon.”

PatsFanInVa

Problem??? It's the only remaining shred of freedom we have -- the fact that it's too much trouble to review that much data.

However, I don't think it's good to gather more and more of it. After all, it's just a matter of taking the humans out of the loop and letting the software decide what constitutes data that merits action.

Why the hell doesn't Cyberdyne have skynet operational yet?

363839

And shortly after people start doing that, those things will be armed.

IcyPatriot

Unmanned aircraft crashes in Maryland, no injuries reported | Fox News

Now what happens when people get killed ... also what happens when there are so many of these things that they cannot all be tracked and a terrorist minded person crashes one with some ammo into an open stadium?

I think the potential for loss of life from these things will outweigh the benefit ... an entire new problem for us to deal with.