- Ring Ring (or some fancy downloaded jazzy ring tone)
- Caller 1 - Dude. Where you at?
- Caller 2 - Yo dude, I'm headed your way. Be there in a sec, K?
- Caller 1 - Oh, I see you.
- Caller 2 - Where you at?
- Caller 1 - I'm over hear...see me waving?
- Caller 2 - Oh, there you are.
- clap, clap - simultaneous clamshells close.
Mundane, right? Why do we need this giant pool of data? Moreover, If it's just like the President suggests (keep in mind, this is the man who said unequivocally that there were WMD in Iraq and that they were prepared to help in the Katrina aftermath), then we are really only talking about a small number of terrorists here. So, collecting such a large set of useless data is like taking down a six year old holding a b-b gun with a howitzer.
I wouldn't want the job of analyzing this data set, would you? What a snoozer of a gig. This brings me to:
Windspike's Wednesday Question du Jour:
What makes you more angry, the fact that they are trampling on our rights to get the worlds most boring data set or that they are wasting taxpayer dollars on such a frivolous collection of data?
5 comments:
My calls go something like this:
Me: Hey dude, can you bring over 3 text books today instead of two?
Dude on phone: Well, I only have 1 and a half text books, and I'm going to read half, so you can have the one.
Me: Well...are they the books you got from Canada last week?
Dude on phone: Nope, these are the books I wrote myself...
Me:Oh, cool. Those books were pretty good...yeah I'll be here until 8.
Dude on phone: Cool, see you in a bit. Later.
Later.
Me: Later.
Click.
If the NSA thing has tought me anything it's that I always knew there was a reason we didn't say "weed" over the phone.
I think this data is actually pretty revealing. Knowing who talks to whom allows them to round up lots of folks through guilt by association. It also lets them know who journalists are talking to, what their "enemies" are involved in, etc.
If it's true that there's just 6 degrees of separation between everyone, we could all be connected to the wrong dots without too much trouble.
A combination of the two, as well as my suspicion that GOP cronies are somehow making more $$$$ from this whole deal, i.e., the phone companies. I truly do not think the supposed brilliant fuckwits at the NSA can do much of anything with all this shit.
I think this data is actually pretty revealing. Knowing who talks to whom allows them to round up lots of folks through guilt by association.
Maybe, but I'd bet that the reason for compiling the "world's most boring database," is triangulation. With just a sampling of calls over say...a week...the government can probably figure out who you are, what your income level is, who you associate with, and where you'll be at every moment over the next week. Valuable information if you need to find somebody for...say...reeducation.
Phone? What's wrong with semaphore?
Anyone in government who thinks terrorists use telephones hasn't yet seen a supermarket scanner or IM on the net.
One known technique is to give all your 'friends' the password to an online document and let everyone edit and read it. No email traffic passes, no telephones involved.
Traffic analysis only works when there's traffic to analyse. If terrorists keep message traffic low, communicating once or twice a year, their phone calls will never rise above the noise. If they break their messages into packets and relay them through a Swiss, German, or South African cutout, who is going to know where the message is directed?
Databasing phone numbers is spying on Americans. Witness the number of terrorists who have been brought to trial using this technique.
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