#SeriouslyDepressed.
]]>This is a diamond mine for contractors. Budgets without limits or oversight into the far future, and they don’t have to explain anything because it is classified. Anyone who starts to annoy them gets put on a watch list, and can expect to be smeared.
]]>The system is useless for finding “terrorist patterns” in that vast pile of data. We don’t have the technology to do that. We wish we did (for some definition of “we” that is Big Data nerds), but Silicon Valley can’t do it right now, yet the NSA comes to us hat in hand for whatever technology we can give them however imperfect it may be, and they certainly wouldn’t be wasting budget on that if they already had something better. However, if you wanted to track *specific* people, the technology works very well for that. Now let’s see. You spend tons of money on a system that hypothetically, at some point in the future, *might* be able to detect terrorists before they strike, but currently, *in the present*, is *very* good at building dossiers on “enemies of the state” i.e. anybody who prefers democracy to rule by the hegemons. So did this system get built for that future theoretical use, or that present practical (from the viewpoint of hegemons) use? Occam’s Razor applies…
-BT
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