Bruce Schneier: Why Collecting More Data Doesn't Increase Safety 149
Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Bruce Schneier, security expert (and rational voice in the wilderness), explains in an editorial on CNN why 'Connecting the Dots' is a 'Hindsight Bias.' In heeding calls to increase the amount of surveillance data gathered and shared, agencies like the FBI have impaired their ability to discover actual threats, while guaranteeing erosion of personal and civil freedom. 'Piling more data onto the mix makes it harder, not easier. The best way to think of it is a needle-in-a-haystack problem; the last thing you want to do is increase the amount of hay you have to search through. The television show Person of Interest is fiction, not fact.'"
Re:Fiction, not fact. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fiction, not fact. (Score:5, Informative)
they identified a lot of people on the cameras. a witness told them which guys were the culprits. the realtime videos did zilch to stop them from leaving bags unattended.
but the point really is that because they got so much intel, they ignored the intel which said that the guys were nutcases. they had a whole city of suspects beforehand so feds didn't spend any agents on surveillance on these guys.. which would have made it fairly obvious that they were gonna do something stupid, so they could have then allocated more agents on surveillance on the culprits, so they could have searched them when they were on their way to the marathon.
I mean, they do such ops monthly in Boston for catching pot dealers.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)