The Mathematics Community and the NSA [pdf]

Re:The Mathematics Community and the NSA [pdf] by nabla9 on Thursday January 15, 2015 @06:47AM (#8892002)

>Using aggregate numbers, of the exceedingly small proportion of the world’s foreign communications we access, NSA algorithms filter out approximately 99.998 percent of the data it sees.

Keeping 0.002% seems like just little bit of data, but is it?

79% of the Internet traffic is video. If you filter out almost all video content and other uninteresting transfer to everyone (50 companies deliver more than half of all Internet traffic), I think you can retain all metadata and all or most unique text based communications. Speech to text filter can keep metadata and at least huge number of keywords from all phone conversations.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The Mathematics Community and the NSA [pdf] by Terr_ on Thursday January 15, 2015 @12:57PM (#8894112)

"Don't worry. Sure, the thief left with all your cash, jewelry, IDs, tax information, and private documents... But 99.998% of the mass contained by your house is still there! Honestly, if it's less than 100kg it's not even worth getting upset about."

Yeah, it's a stupid statistic designed to mislead, since the metric bears no real relationship to the impact or severity of the act.

I wonder how the NSA would react if a spy browsed all their top-secret documents, but made copies of "only 0.002%" of them?

[ Parent | on HN ]