Re: The scum leading the dumb
To press on with more or less irrelevant analogies, you also do not find a needle in a haystack if you do not look for it, and you are more likely to find a needle in a haystack if you look at all of it than if you look only at part.
It is worthwhile to keep in mind that SigInt agency capture and filtering of internet backbone data flows is pretty much the same thing they were (and are) doing with radio signals at places like Menwith Hill and Sugar Grove, and in numerous other listening stations before them. The internet changed the transmission means, but nothing else.
The fact that nearly all terrorist perpetrators were known (for some definition of known) may indicate no more than police/intelligence staffing insufficient to follow up on all of them. That seems to have been true in the Charlie Hebdo shootings and may have been a factor in the more recent ones in Paris. It is not clear whether increased data collection and analysis would make things better or worse, although I suspect the latter. Manpower and other resources used for collection and analysis might better be used for direct surveillance of those thought to be risks, and John Poindexter's notion that sorting and collating all the data by machine would replace human agents with algorithms always was pretty much a pipe dream, completely aside form the fact that it couldn't be sold even in the immediate post-9/11 panic.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
