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.'"
Didn't the FBI say something similar (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Fiction, not fact. (Score:4, Interesting)
Not really on either count, though there is certainly an idiot involved here--just not Schneier.
The Boston guys were identified by having one camera showing one of the guys PLANTING THE DAMNED BOMB. Everything else was confirmation. Facial recognition did not help. Spying on people's cell phones did not help. All the high tech crap that law enforcement is always saying they need was almost totally useless, as would every other camera have been had one not been pointing at where one of the suspects planted explosives. If you start from the end point, it's kind of easy to work your way back. I'm not saying the other cameras were uselss, only that they were not useful in primary identification of the first suspect.
Case in point: humans who work for the FBI do not particularly have, on average, better observation skills or vision than anybody else. What they did have was information they didn't share with anybody else at first, specifically the video of the planting of the explosive. Lacking that bit of rather important data, the Internet community tried to prove the value of social networking and crowdsourcing (because we all know those things are superior to absolutely everything, right?), and managed to incorrectly identify several people as suspects who had nothing to do with the bombing at all. In other words, they were spectacularly wrong in absolutely every detail. Despite my sincerest hopes, this will probably not be the knife that stabs social networking in the back, though a man can dream I suppose.
Bottom line: having the video data available was useful. Having video data of a public place is not in and of itself privacy invading, especially when it's only looked at to solve an actual crime. What is privacy invading, and ultimately useless, is doing things like facial recognition, cell phone location tracking, and other things that build up a specific database of where people have been and at what time "just in case". That is the kind of thing we do NOT need more of, or any of, and this case proves exactly that, not the opposite. So the FBI won this battle, and good for them and for the rest of us that they did, but here's hoping that the method of that victory also helps them lose the war on privacy. Schneier is quite the genius.