The Scary Possibilities of Computerized Snooping

[gulliver]

I'm not sure Americans realize the real technical danger here.

We seem to fall into two camps:

1) If someone listens to my conversations or reads my e-mail, that's fine. I have nothing to hide.
2) I don't want anyone listening to my conversations or reading my e-mail without a warrant

What I don't think people necessarily realize is that both of the above positions are quaint. We just learned today that Bush "snooped" on all international calls. How exactly did they do that if not by computer? And if they snooped all calls by computer, then it is clear why they couldn't get any kind of warrant. It is a fishing expedition, not surveillance.

Everyone knows that e-mail can be screened for spam. They also know that it is possible to convert voice to text. So in theory, it would be possible to run every telephone conversation and every e-mail through a sort of Bayesian categorization program. If people used the wrong combinations of words, their names would pop up on a list somewhere. Welcome to Brazil.

I'm just not sure how happy anyone would be if they knew just how potent new computer technology is for good and evil if we open this Pandora's box.

On the one hand, it would be possible to keep an audit trail (on disk farms and other media) of every voice, e-mail, IM conversation, indexed by ever-increasingly sophisticated automated analysis. If Bush is allowed to get away with what he did, then potentially every phone conversation anyone ever had could be "Googled," cross-correlated for person-to-person linkages, geographic whereabouts ... you name it. I doubt supporters of Bush are considering those possibilities.

On the other hand, suppose this technology had been in place before 9/11. It may or may not have prevented 9/11. Seriously. And if it didn't, it would have made it much easier to quickly track down co-conspirators. With warrant-less automated snooping, you could audit trail essentially everyone. Solve past crimes, detect patterns of spoken or written mental illness or sedition...

You could find out who has guns and where they are.

I wonder if Bush's base realizes that.