Jennifer Granick has a good column in Wired News on the issue of Technologies of Mass Surveillance. The article is obviously prompted by speculation that Bush’s warrantless searches of Americans really has to do with data mining which doesn’t lend itself readily to the warrant application process.
Never mind that this practice is illegal. It’s probably worse than useless given the problem presented by false positives generated by the mass surveillance. Given that we live in a world where filtering software can’t distinguish between pornographic websites and breast cancer survivor websites, any mass surveillance is going to generate false positives.
As Ms. Granick puts it:
Mass surveillance isn’t just illegal, it’s probably a bad idea. We need to ferret out real terrorists, not create a smoke screen of expensive and distracting false positives that they can hide behind. More information doesn’t make us smarter. We need smarter information.
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