In fact I hope that they are spying on
everybody - and not just looking at what numbers we are dialing but also emails, internet forums, electronic transactions, street cameras - the more data they can collate and analyze, the better will be the result. The ultimate system would be one like in
Person of Interest, where an unbiased and incorruptible 'machine' identifies perpetrators in time for us to
prevent acts of violence, not just mop up after them.
The reason for that is simple. What the NSA is collecting now is only barely scratching the surface. To be more effective the surveillance needs to be more comprehensive.
I strongly disagree with that, for several reasons. One is that history has shown over and over again that huge data collection can and _will_ be abused. It is one thing to collect lots of data to find some bad guy. It is another to use the same data to force one's will onto some "non-bad guy". Don't like your political opponent? Sift through the data, filter for anything you can threaten your opponent with to get your will, done. I'm sure that this is not what you would like to see.
Another problem is simply that of scale, which is also what my previous comment was intended to touch on. Bascially, in the end you would need one "watcher" per person you want to watch, to get enough info. Then you have to coordinate and process that info with info you got about others. The efforts to do that are, in my opinion, simply not worth the little results that could be gained by that, not to mention that it basically means that people have to give up their privacy in the first place.
Bad guys are simply a very small minority. Having the majority suffer to get to them is disproportional.
We have a similar discussion here in Germany about the "Voratsdatenspeicherung", a data retention that collects as much as it can get, to have it stored for half a year or more, just in case. We had that in place once, for about a year. It had virtually no effect. Traditional investigative work was enough. We know that because there was no measurable increase in resolved crimes. That law was overturned by our highest court, but the law enforcement people kept crying that they need this soooo urgently, that they would basically paralyzed without it.
Our local law stemmed from an EU directive that EU countries should implementt such a meassure. Now the EU court has ruled that such a law, as they intended it, is wrong and thus it is cancelled. But still over here they cry that they need it so badly. It's also interresting for what they want to use it. Initially it was meant as a tool to counter worst crimes, like child pornography, etc. Only for the hardest and worst stuff, they said. In theh one year we had it, it quickly eroded, the scope was to be widened to include "lesser" crimes.
This means that first they introduce a tool with a somewhat good reasoning. But once they have it, they want to broaden it up for stuff it never was intended for. Plus, it never really provided positive results anyways.
I agree. Better intel helps to avoid mistakes, and military action based on bad intel usually causes more harm than good. Enlightened foreign policy should help to improve our relations and remove the causes for anger.
A good start would be not to things like drone-attacks that are supposedly for a single target, while also causing lots of civillian casualities. I mean, heck, what good is their intelligence if they are unable to see that the target person is in the middle of a funeral or wedding, with lots and lots of other people? If that is the quality of the intelligence they can gather, then i'd say they better junk that intelligence alltogether.
If you know where a target is, why not trying to take it out in a more traditional way, with very few (if any) civilian casualities? Why the use of high-tech toys that seem to be rather "unsurgical"?
I'm pretty sure that the majority of the population would prefer to get rid of those bad guys as well, so i would think that it shouldn't be too hard to get their support in ratting them out. Of course, that requires to make friends with the population, instead of antagonizing them.
But there will always be a hard core of haters that will never go away, no matter how nice we are. And let us not forget that
domestic terrorism is still the greater threat. These are the people who don't just hate our freedoms, they use them against us.
Yes, there will allway be haters. And there will never be anything you can do about that, no matter how much surveilance you do. That's why i mentioned the law of diminishing returns. At some point you have to ask yourself what else could be done to save lifes. And deaths due to terrorism are few if compared to other causes thatt could be prevented more easily with less effort.
Again, this is not to say that nothing at all should be done against terrorists. But there simply is a point were waging a "war on terror" becomes rather futile. You simply will never be able to get rid of it completely. The same way you will never get rid of murderers, thieves, etc. completely. It's simply a fact of life that there will always be such idiots around.
Keeping them at bay instead of trying to find and erradicate every single one of them is, in my opinion, a much better way. Doing so should not be, of course, a purely military action. Such people don't pop out of a vacuum. Most of them get radicalized somewhere in their life. Get the worst of them by military action, causing as little civillian casualities as possible. Don't just do a remote controlled drone attack on a single target that is in a crowd of inncoent civillians because it is so easy.
Then, also help the people in general. First of all, give them aid and education. Especially education. Ignorance is the best breeding ground for radicalization. Build hospitals, schools and universities. Send good teachers, or educate their people to become doctors, teachers and professors themselves. Also, and very important, i think: liberate the women and educate them.
That way you will get people that are happy you are there, who can see and experience real benefits of you being there. You will get them on your side, helping you to find the nasty ones.
At least that's how i see things. Mass surveilance is nothing more than putting a very expensive and inefficient band-aid on the results of a cause, it does nothing to get rid of the cause in the first place. In fact, the way it all is done now is very likely to help spread that cause.
Greetings,
Chris
