Well said. I work with marketing databases. I have said for some time that if we really want to find terrorists in this country, turn the data over to marketers. They would have them segmented into the exact variety of terrorist in three weeks.
Actually, that is almost what the NSA program is doing, adopting the tactics of web marketers to find terrorists. The reason it isn’t as effective is not because the NSA can’t duplicate the tactics of the marketers, it’s because they are not allowed to duplicate all those tactics. They can’t, for example, try to finagle ways to put tracking cookies on everyone’s computer, or try to deceive us into installing tracking software on our machines. There are limits on how much data they can grab and keep indiscriminately too.
So, if we allowed them even more unrestricted surveillance, they’d be just as effective as marketers, but they’d also be much more destructive. Marketers just use their power to annoy us, but the government wouldn’t stop at that.