NSA Surveillance

Over the past few months it has come to the public's attention that the NSA has been gathering as much information as it can possibly get from US citizens by means that are controversial and that are tiptoeing on the edges of what is legal. In that context I will provide proof that the current US domestic surveillance is a tool that is inefficient, bloated and detrimental for the long term well being of the US democracy. To do that I will use opinions and analysis that are not my own, but are those of the security expert Bruce Schneier. One way to view the effectiveness of surveillance is to glean what the systems have done for the prevention of terrorist attacks against the US. The way to do something with the enormous amounts of data that has been collected is to use it to prevent actual attack plots in action. But that is not possible because of too much information available to sift through. The 'connect the dots' [1] metaphor is used by mister Schneier to show that when a terrorist attack has already happened the events in the database of security reports can easily be correlated. That is not so easy before the actual attack because there are so many behaviors and situations that could solicit attention that the investigators cannot decide which one is going to require actual investigators going in the field to look further into it. This has actually happened in the 9/11 attacks and other similar attacks where the investigators went back and found out that they had been tracking the attackers. Too many dots and none are numbered. The way to actually be successful in catching terrorists is to have investigators that are very well trained for the job using the existing legal framework[2]. In the crazy aftermath of the 9/11 attacks airline security has been hugely increased in ways that are not necessarily effective. The same can be said about NSA's insistence on having domestic surveillance. But police has been particularly effective in stopping terrorist plots by using regular investigative means. There is a need to keep doing the same type of work that was in place before 9/11 better supported by the political leaders by more funding and doing less of something new and shiny. All else, including domestic unconstrained surveillance, is security theater that makes people only feel secure without any added actual security[3]. To understand why the US constitution and legal system is such that government has restricted power we have to go back to basics. The Founding Fathers of the United Stated recognized the problems of the autocratic governments from Europe that drove them across an ocean in the first place. The same kind of bad behavior can be seen in the US in the present with government and corporations helping each other to betray people that are US citizens and customers[4]. Those same restrictions that were in place from the beginning are working to restrict some of that insatiable wish of the two parties to not act in a moral and ethical way. That is true even for the laws passed through Congress in the wake of 9/11. The definition of terrorism in those laws has been used to convict of terrorism a 82 years old nun participating at an antinuclear protes, where the worst thing she has done was cutting a barbed wire and spraying messages on a wall[5]. The use of private corporation data by government is bad enough. The attempt by NSA and others to make the surveillance requirement paramount will have effects on day to day living[6]. The need to make surveillance possible will create a situation where all technology needs to provides trackability. That has not gone well in the case of the Great Firewall of China with security problems in the actual tracking software. To quote mister Schneier himself: 'It's bad civic hygiene to build technologies that could someday be used to facilitate a police state'. [1] https://www.schneier.com... [2] https://www.schneier.com... [3] 19:11 to end [4] 24:40 to 26.25 [5] https://www.schneier.com... [6] https://www.schneier.com...