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A comment on The NSA Admits It Analyzes More People's Data Than Previously Revealed. Parent comment

Re:The NSA Admits It Analyzes More People's Data Than Previo... by Terretta on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @04:42PM (#6060108)
On the contrary, common sense--as most of us understand it--has nothing to do with this. The rationale is to gather all data that's potentially useful at some unknown point in the future, and hang on to it for that unknown eventuality.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The NSA Admits It Analyzes More People's Data Than Previo... by res0nat0r on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @07:26PM (#6060693)
>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.

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).

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The NSA Admits It Analyzes More People's Data Than Previo... by shirkey on Wednesday July 17, 2013 @09:34PM (#6061213)
Debugging of your source code is not equal to a pervasive surveillance state intruding on individual privacy, unless you are to assume (incorrectly) that we are all owned by the state and have no independent rights apart from the state.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The NSA Admits It Analyzes More People's Data Than Previo... by res0nat0r on Thursday July 18, 2013 @02:10AM (#6062046)
In the eyes of the law, debugging my source code and tracking every place your car drives on public roads (non intrusively without attaching a GPS device) are exactly the same: legal.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The NSA Admits It Analyzes More People's Data Than Previo... by DennisP on Thursday July 18, 2013 @07:34AM (#6062880)
But previous articles posted to HN have had arguments by law professors that at least some of what the NSA is doing is actually illegal, even aside from questions of constitutionality.
[ Parent | on HN ]