The "filters" the government is claiming

[shraby]

they put on to just filter out what they want is bogus. What's to stop anyone from scrambling certain words to evade the filters? Take the date Sept. 11. It could be 1 Ptes 1. A filter would never catch it, but perps would know what it means.

[troubleinwinter]

1. Email spammers do it every day.

I get ads for "vi@ gra" and "v@l ium", etc., constantly.

[unblock]

2. they're intrusive AND stupid

anyone mentioning words like "terrorism", "9/11", "bomb", etc., are probably caught and listened to.

:eyes:

[Cleita]

3. Stupid is the operative word here in everything they do.

Also, they can take a simple solution to a problem and make it so convoluted that even experts can't figure out what they mean.

[HereSince1628]

4. Much filtering can be done without any attention to content.

The routing information on transmitted communications provides plenty of information to build screening profiles. You don't necessarily need content analysis of every communication, moreover, you especially want to detect and analyze specific profiles in a timeframe that is operationally useful.

As we saw for 9/11, it took NSA 3 days to detect, analyze and distribute information on 2 phone calls intercepted in Afganistan on 9-10 whose content refered to events happening on a "tomorrow" in a way that may have been statements of the 911 attack date the next day. That only involved telephone calls from Afganistan--I am guessing Afganistan in 2001 had many many fewer telephone calls daily than the US.

Imagine the workload for international communications from or in the US. That information could NEVER be processed to provide information that could prevent an event UNLESS there was a way to prioritize the effort. To do that the NSA undoubtedly uses some sort of profiling, or its euphamism--filtering.