Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: LordODiscipline
Please provide a reference for that statement - and, when you do - please let me know if theyare using it for this purpose - or, if they simply have a database (total) capable of doing this - but, that they are not using it for anything else.
Whether they have the capability is not in question for anyone familiar with their work; I do InfoSec work, and have colleagues that have been at their facilities. It's impressive, and not really all that frightening.
I haven't a clue whether they use such a database. It doesn't really matter. There are perfectly legitimate reasons for them to do so, including research, traffic analysis, and any number of other things that do not actually constitute any significant privacy violation.
The NSA isn't the bad guy. They're more like a gun. A gun doesn't shoot anyone. However, if pointed at someone, and fired, it will reliably deliver a metal slug to the intended target at (usually) hypersonic velocities. The NSA is similar. And, so far, they appear to be put to reasonable uses, although the deployment of CALEA and such could be a bit worrisome to some. It's poor sociohygienics, but far from a conspiracy.
There are a lot of intelligent, aware people working there, experts in their field. Most of them civilian.
Rolling out such a database is simple enough. I've worked with systems that can hold the information and do traffic analysis on it. There's only a few tens of billions of calls made every day, most likely. Not a whole lot to work through.
However, if you want an impression of the scope of their capabilities, consider that they have most of the foremost mathematical minds in the country, the largest supercomputing capabilities in the country (perhaps the world), and a mind-boggling budget. Plus, there's the bit about their hardware requiring enough power to be the second largest consumer of electricity in the state.
For another idea of the hardware involved, just have a look at the PowerPC architecture (I think that was the one) ISA; it contains the POPC instruction, which wasn't in the original plans. Except, NSA said buying it was out of the question if IBM didn't add it, which would have brought the whole project below the break-even point for IBM. That's the kind of hardware quantity we're talking about.
The research coming out of there is amazing, and extremely useful to the civilian world.
quote:
This is such a silly statement it reeks of sensationalist propoganda designed to insense the unthinking with stats which are unachievable.[/quite]
I'd tend to agree that it's fairly irrelevant to the bit about interrogation. Yes, there's a lot of convergence in a bad direction, from a sociohygienic point of view, but a conspiracy is not credible at this point, nor relevant.
quote:
If you were to bring back the founding fathers and show them what is going on here today they would totally freak out.
Of course - who could have envisioned at that time internet porn and McDonalds - I would have a freaking bird too.
~nod~
Tubgirl would probably give them a worse coronary than the state of the politics.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: "enhanced interrogation techniques" - is ... - 
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