Sunday, January 19, 2014

Surveilling and Failing

One of the interesting problems with our government surveillance efforts, perhaps a minor interesting problem, is the way it did NOT succeed in stopping:

1) The Benghazi assault
2) The Fort Hood massacre
3) The Boston Marathon bombing
4) The Snowden exposé of the government surveillance efforts

These all seem preventable and detectable in retrospect.

The problem, I think, is that the government is "drinking from the firehose". There's just too much data coming through to make any sense of it.

On the TV show, Person Of Interest, there is an omniscient artificial intelligence that drinks successfully from the firehose to predict these sorts of events. But in real life, that kind of artificial intelligence doesn't exist.

No one really knows
how to tame the firehose.

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