| Posted by | Message |
TigerinATL 
New Orleans Saints Fan
Member since Feb 2005
26174 posts
| re: Why would the US government need to surveil all its citizens? (Posted on 12/3/12 at 8:32 am to WikiTiger)
quote:
What purpose does this serve?
The will of the people. People want nothing bad to ever happen, there's really only one way to do that. You need lots of information to run a pre-crime division.
|
| Back to top | |
lsu480 
Arizona State Fan
1488 posts
Member since Oct 2007
48060 posts
| re: Why would the US government need to surveil all its citizens? (Posted on 12/3/12 at 9:37 am to TigerinATL)
quote:
The will of the people. People want nothing bad to ever happen, there's really only one way to do that. You need lots of information to run a pre-crime division.
This
|
| Back to top | |
baytiger
New Orleans Saints Fan
Houston
Member since Dec 2007
40604 posts
| re: Why would the US government need to surveil all its citizens? (Posted on 12/3/12 at 9:47 am to WikiTiger)
quote:
Can anyone explain why exactly this is necessary?
well if they're not monitoring everybody, you never know who they should be monitoring, right?
|
| Back to top | |
buddhavista
Member since Jul 2012
3543 posts
| re: Why would the US government need to surveil all its citizens? (Posted on 12/3/12 at 9:49 am to WikiTiger)
I honestly don't know how they will make sense of all the data.
I know the data centers they are building are huge, but generating tangible information from all this data is almost impossible.
Hell, credit card companies can have trouble sifting through credit card transactions to find patterns. And that is a lot less information than this.
|
| Back to top | |
TigerinATL
New Orleans Saints Fan
Member since Feb 2005
26174 posts
| re: Why would the US government need to surveil all its citizens? (Posted on 12/3/12 at 10:03 am to buddhavista)
quote:
but generating tangible information from all this data is almost impossible
How can a survey of 1,000 or so people come close to mirroring actual election results for a nation of 300 million? Because there's a limited number of ways that people do and say things. If you have a pattern to look for, it becomes easy for the computer to find the needle in the haystack. I would imagine they are doing some obvious searches like people buying specific things, going specific places or contacting specific people.
|
| Back to top | |
buddhavista
Member since Jul 2012
3543 posts
| re: Why would the US government need to surveil all its citizens? (Posted on 12/3/12 at 10:11 am to TigerinATL)
quote:
Because there's a limited number of ways that people do and say things. If you have a pattern to look for, it becomes easy for the computer to find the needle in the haystack. I would imagine they are doing some obvious searches like people buying specific things, going specific places or contacting specific people.
sure, I can see being able to put together patterns that say - oh, if a guy named ahmed buys gasoline, fertilizer and rents a uhaul, we got a problem.
But actually information out of huge data sets (not just an individual case) is really fricking hard. even for the NSA. This doesn't mean there is no risk to privacy, there is. I suspect they are collecting all of this information knowing computing processes are accelerating and technology for sifting large amounts of data is improving.
I would love to be the storage vendor for the NSA, I bet they spend a shite ton of money.
|
| Back to top | |
Turbeauxdog 
LSU Fan
Member since Aug 2004
4708 posts
| re: Why would the US government need to surveil all its citizens? (Posted on 12/3/12 at 6:49 pm to WikiTiger)
To protect the children obviously. Why do you hate children?
|
| Back to top | |
