Posted on 03/16/2010 12:24:00 PM PDT by bs9021
Looking for Patterns in Chaos
Tilla Bradley, March 16, 2010
The government is constantly looking for ways to identify threats to national security before American citizens are threatened. Since the 1980s, the intelligence community has struggled with the challenges of monitoring electronic communication while protecting the privacy of its citizens. Journalist Shane Harris, the author of The Watcher: The Rise of the U.S. Surveillance State addresses these challenges and the solutions that the government is attempting to develop in his latest book. Also on the panel to comment on the book were former journalist, and analyst with the Cato Institute Julian Sanchez and Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies, at the Cato Institute, who acted as a moderator for the discussion.
After any terrorist attack, the intelligence community finds evidence that, if pieced together properly at the outset, would have led to information that could have prevented the attack. However, the general consensus is that the government continually fails to connect the dots. In the 1980s, John Poindexter suggested the establishment of Total Information Awareness, a program that would collect and monitor domestic information while encrypting the data to protect the privacy of citizens and ensure the loyalty of the analysts that received the data.
In the early 1980s the NSA experimented with various programs to find terrorists. The problem that became rapidly apparent was that the analysts had trouble making sense of the information that had been collected. Harris noted that “information in a bureaucracy equals power.” However, the government failed to find a way to connect the information that they have collected in a meaningful way....
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...
There are only 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary and those who don’t.
Shane Harris is sometimes a coauthor with the perpetual antiTrumper, Jeffery Goldberg of The Atlantic.
I see Jeffrey Goldberg’s latest article in the Houthi strike phone call is coauthored by this same Shane Harris.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.