Just a guess: Me<->Senator<->Movie Exec<->Kevin Bacon

With 4 or more hops it surely becomes pretty trivial. "Phonecall hops" are a much lower bar than "worked with" hops.

If they say "Two or three", that makes me believe that they have no constraints on it, and merely query as many hops' worth of data as is enough to give what they feel to be Enough. "Two or three" implies, IMO, "... to five".

1: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/technology/between-you-and...

> For a sense of scale, researchers at the University of Milan found in 2011 that everyone on the Internet was, on average, 4.74 steps away from anyone else.

Even if you assume a low chance of everyone getting hit in 3 hops from one Kevin Bacon, there of course isn't just one Kevin Bacon. That "terrorist watch list" is pretty damn long.

I'm from Norway, and yet can easily make that kind of connection in 4 hops: I've spoken to a few Norwegian MP's, who obviously have spoken to quite a few Norwegian prime ministers.

There's probably a number of other connections from her as she would have met any number of internationally renowned people both in capacity as prime minister and as WHO director - including US politicians - that might have met Kevin Bacon, but courtesy of the Oracle of Bacon she also has a Bacon number of 2 based on appearing in a talkshow as a guest alongside Michael Bolton documentary with Michael Bolton, who has appeared in some awards show with Kevin Bacon.

Chances are good there's some less obvious route that'd get me there in 3 hops. Once you "allow" off screen meetings, it gets really easy.

It would surprise me, for example, if Kevin Bacon hasn't met some relatively prominent US politicians and/or celebrities that has met one of the Norwegian MP's I've spoken to (for two hops), or if he hasn't met one of the US politicians or artists that have been at the Nobel peace price concerts, where they'd have met either aforementioned Gro Harlem Brundtland or any number of other Norwegian politicians that would either include someone I've met or definitively have met someone I've met (for 3 hops).

I think people tend to overestimate how many steps it'll take, because they see these celebrities and politicians they can't relate to that they think are so far apart from "their" world, but of course that is silly because these people tend to meet a lot of people, and so are natural "shortcuts" to get low number of hops to anyone. For example:

I'm two hops from Mao and Castro (via a trade-union rep I met that was introduced to Mao on a group trip to China in the 60's, and a former left wing politician I've met that met Castro on a visit to Cuba), and as a result at most 3 hops from Stalin and Nixon and most other major leaders contemporaneous with either of them, ranging from "ordinary politicians" to a fascinating laundry list of horrible dictators.

It really is a small world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon

Just a heads up, your example only had 3 hops.

You (Hop 1) Senator (Hop 2) Movie Exec (Hop 3) Kevin Bacon

Note Comcast and other commodity services and their tendency for geographical monopolies, and that this is wholeheartedly supported by the governments by which they operate.

Got it.

Got it.

Got it. Forever. --NSA

(And me as well, but seeing as I'm a dirty foreigner I'm sure they've got me already)

Common sense says that they would not look at that data. If the response is "well they're power hungry, they'll look at whatever they want" then the discussion about the number of hops used is irrelevant since a power-hungry and abusive organization would find no value in limits on this sort of thing in the first place.

Case in point: all the license plate surveillance stories that came out today. (Not sure why today, this has been well understood for a couple years now.)

Every single government official and LEO talked to about this data say that gathering and keeping the data indefinitely on 260 million plates, in order to apprehend just 136 individuals, is good practice.

If that's your definition of common sense, I want nothing to do with it.

And the point of this "hops" story isn't whether they're looking at everyone now, it's whether your data is being automatically gathered and stored today to construct who knows what perspectives about you in the future. And at 3 hops of potentially useful data, odds are yes.

>If that's your definition of common sense, I want nothing to do with it.

I would think this is a perfectly acceptable reason from the point of the NSA, or as someone who would like as much data available as possible to debug a problem. If I could log every event on every cloud instance I've ever launched negligibly this would be something I obviously would want to do as it would help tracking down issues immensely (assuming that I'm not drowning from data overload).

But, in reality, they are doing exactly what they represent, except without limitations. So, there is direct bearing.

And, the concern is that by fudging the limits, it's gone from a limited program that gives at least a nod to 4tb Amendment protections to one that is virtually unlimited.

The discussion about the number of hops is the result of their attempts to thwart oversight. They are misrepresenting what they are doing, so as to avoid constraints.

In other words, they are power-hungry and abusive.

b/c it has nothing to do with an investigation...now blackmail and extortion??? That's another story.

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/king-like-all-frauds-yo...

Summed up by a history prof:

When you teach American history as I do, you get asked about conspiracies a lot. As it happens, I’m skeptical about some of the biggest conspiracy theories out there — unlike nearly all of my students, for instance, I think it’s highly likely that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

But I’m not one to ridicule such theories either, and I find the smug dismissal with which they’re so often greeted deeply obnoxious. Because forty-seven years ago one of America’s highest ranking law enforcement agents launched a secret campaign intended to blackmail the country’s most prominent civil rights activist into committing suicide.

That’s not a theory, it’s a fact. And once you know that, it gets a lot harder to dismiss other people’s stories of shadowy government goings-on.

-- http://studentactivism.net/2012/01/15/the-fbis-attempt-to-bl...

Also, odious as the letter is, it's not exactly forceful. If MLK's civil rights struggle had been shifted forward in time today and he had posted the "I Have A Dream" speech directly to Youtube, he'd have found far worse.

Every few months another cop or DMV employee is busted for looking at records they shouldn't. In my book, this problem of collecting the data but not partitioning it from bad actors is one that should be getting more airtime at all levels of government and all levels of security.

(1) Agree that the powers technology has implicitly granted the DoJ are a cause for concern; and

(2) am comforted, not alarmed, by a drumbeat of stories about government employees getting busted for looking at records they shouldn't be looking at.

We don't need concrete proof of current wrong-doing in order to take lessons from history. That is the value of history.

"b/c it has nothing to do with an investigation...now blackmail and extortion???"

I read that as something stronger than "we need to take lessons from history." I think the statement goes further than that to claim that the NSA's purported justifications are entirely pretense and the real motivation is blackmail and extortion. That I think requires stronger proof than "someone sometime did something."

Have you read Caro's _Power Broker_? If not, you should!

Tying fear and caution to organizations prevents you from learning much of anything from history as the offending organizations are almost all abolished, abandoned, or reorganized. Should experimentalists working in medicine and the humanities not learn from the Tuskegee Experiment because Public Health Service is a different organization today and the Tuskegee Institute no longer exists in a meaningful way?

OTOH, it's perfectly reasonable to be concerned about the capabilities that we give our government. That is exactly what distinguishes various forms of government and exactly why we have a Constitution that defines ours as it does.

Second why would they limit it to one direction? There seems to be little if any legal or practical downside to simply collecting more data.