I follow your claim that NSA analysts are aware of the problems that are raised on this thread, particularly the problem of false positives. I share your conviction that they are aware of them.

I don’t see, however, where you’ve said anything about how it is possible to grapple with these problems, or what features a system that does so is likely to have.

Absent that, you haven’t done much to advance the discussion.

Why that would be the point, precisely.

Think closely about the trust system this requires. A whole separate society, partitioned off from the banal outer world, cloistered, arrogant (as laocoon comes off lecturing a maths/engineering professional) and with internal self correcting mechanisms necessarily opaque to us, the hoi polloi.

Why laocoon would have, even in his eminence, magnamaniously defered to Teller and von Neumann, true? We should have trusted them, and not asked questions.

And laocoon, I am highly curious how the NSA prevents easter eggs. Or does it just punish them? How does secrecy interact with each management mode?

Meta alert: this even touches on the current raging notion of ID vs evolution: the ID crowd claims (Fuller, especially) that the scientific cabal prescribes a single “truth”, and the hoi polloi must accept it.

I think this is rancid bs. The internalized communitized socialized what have you notion of truth in the scientific community is out in the literature. Increasingly it is on the arXiv or in citeseer, with near instantaneous access to pdfs or sometimes just ps’s of the original papers.

Here we have the NSA prescribing a single “truth”, and we have the likes of the eminent laocoon defending the practice because we dirty ordinary citizens don’t have the mental acumen to correctly judge the necessarily opaque processes which protect us from the Iranian and NK nukes in a suitcase doomsday scenario. Oh wait…

However, I do want to point out that the fact that NSA analysts are smart doesn’t really support that conclusion. After all, their goals are established by the administration. I know a number of brilliant physicists who worked on SDI in the 1980s even though they knew it wouldn’t work because it funded them to do interesting physics.

The false positive problem is a major one in all areas of computer security—biometrics, intrusion detection, and code analysis for some examples—and the solution is almost certainly going to be using the techniques in certain limited ways, not in coming up with solutions that are 99.999% accurate. Even humans aren’t that accurate at voice recognition under the conditions given above. For example, an effective use of face recognition is to verify that the person in front of a scanner is the person who he claims to be, a 1:1 matching problem instead of the N:M matching problem of identifying faces in a crowd.

A PhD in Mathematics is just the start of the required background. I used to give out PhD’s to folks, so I do know a little about what it takes to get one. Another essential element is familiarity with classified techniques of analysis, classified counter-techniques of thwarting analysis, classified counter-counter-techniques … and a lot of empirical experience doing classified analysis of real (aka classified) data. Abstract analysis is nice, but nothing can match seeing the real data.

So, again, this is the kind of discussion one gives to new analysts on their first few days on the job – and they don’t get down to real learning until much later.

We love to be democratic and give everyone a fair hearing, which is wonderful. It’s great that we don’t blindly accept whatever so-called experts claim. But sometimes there are real experts who truly do have amazing expertise. And in this case, they can’t speak, or even identify themselves.

“Hero in error” Chalabi has a PhD in Mathematics from the UoC.

tom t., what does that have to do with computer automation?

More generally, it’s worth noting that one should be skeptical of human intelligence as well. It’s also going to produce a lot of false positives, wasted motion, and bad policy initiatives (see, e.g., Ahmed Chalabi).

The folks who do the work being discussed are quite aware of all the issues raised by Ars Technica, as well as many more, at a much higher level of sophistication than anyone has discussed on that blog.

The NSA has the finest statisticians in the world, and they know quite well that Bayes’ Theorem shows that P[A|B] = .999 and P[-A|-B] = 0.999 are perfectly compatible with P[B|A] = 0.001, if P[B] = 10E-6.

And the trivial math above is just the simplest possible example (and the clear statement of the tediously verbose dolphins/fish example). Of course, this is also why face-recognition is a failure, where A=”face classified as belonging to terrorist” and B=”face’s owner really is a terrorist”.

Similar errors abound:
A=”Is a muslim”
B=”Is a terrorist” (OK, P[B|A] = 0.8, but you get the point)

And so on.

In short, just because most media rabble-rousers, admistration apologists, blog writers, and blog readers are not mathematically sophisticated is no reason to assume that professional designers of intelligence algorithms are similarly unsophisticated.

Isn’t it interesting that jet comes out and admits that he doesn’t mind this under a Republican, but will under a Democrat. A clear advocacy of rule of Republican rather than rule of law.

Perhaps just one more scaremonger. But if even barely true, it is really sad.

Straighforward and announced govt. monitoring and tracking is a pain in the proverbial, but a fair number of people across the world, something like the folks living in that tiny bit of land mass between Amman and Tokyo, are used to it, and have evolved systems and habits to deal with it. But privatised and outsourced monitoring is just taking all this ‘Capitalism is God’ to absurd heights.

The sword has always evolved faster than the shield, and this techno-crap is only useful after you’ve identified a target. Sifting the masses is just a gross denial of civil rights. What’s going on here is just some profiling of every person tapped and anyone serious about not getting caught will have no problem hiding their proxies behind non-descript ip’s that are normal everyday traffic, and hide their encrypted communications inside core files, executables, media, whatever.

But as long as this injustice is reserved for communications where at least one party is not a US citizen, I’m not sure I’m that bothered. Of course I’ll be changing my mind when another Clinton is in office and not only uses the FBI and IRS against Republicans, but now will be using the NSA.

While the NSA is the largest employer of mathematicians, I doubt their technological lead in speech recognition is significant. Sure, they can do better than any one university, but they can’t do better than all them cooperating together. Historically, intelligence has had a technical lead only in fields where few engineers were working and that lead disappears rapidly when that fact changes.

The history of cryptography shows how quickly their technological lead can evaporate; after WW2, intelligence services had a monopoly on modern cryptology. Yet it didn’t take much effort for IBM to invent much of it themselves in their Lucifer cipher, and in the 1970s Diffie/Hellman, with no support compared to the NSA, helped to bootstrap the academic field of cryptography and re-invented public key cryptography only about a decade after British intelligence had.

In any case, an investigation like this intrinsically has high redundancy. If a potential terrorist is foolist enough to use words like “anthrax” and “White House” in conversation about plans involving such, he and his compatriots are likely to do so repeatedly. Such redundancy enables a lot of error correction (I’m assuming the NSA would be using fuzzy logic, and therefore prioritizing matches by probability. If I’m smart enough to think of that, the NSA is).

However, the fact is any terrorists foolish enough to do that are not terrorists we have to worry much about. Who will do that are people with unpopular political opinions, particularly of the liberal variety, as liberals tend to want to believe in the system and are emotionally resistant to “conspiracy theories”. If you want to know the actual purpose of this system, look at what such a system could realistically achieve.

As for traffic analysis, is a warrant even required for that? I would be surprised if so, and it’s possible to imagine FISA being reluctant to hand one over.

That said, I do think Lambert at Corrente is right. This is aimed primarily at the Internet, not voice traffic. Now is the time to stop trusting the system and recognized that the Internet needs enforcable privacy.