老澳门开奖结果

Businessweek has a out on the data-mining company Palantir. The piece opens with the dramatic story of a 鈥渇oreign national named Mike Fikri鈥� who engaged in a string of transactions that, taken together, sound very suspicious 鈥� making large withdrawals from a Russian bank, repeated phone calls to Syria, solo visits to Disneyland, and renting a large truck. But, software made by Palantir connects the dots about Fikri, alerts the authorities, and his simmering terrorist plot is foiled.

Only thing is, this story is completely fictional. And that speaks volumes.

We humans are story-driven beings, and a compelling narrative like this can be more powerful than any amount of facts, figures and logic.

But, as Businessweek reveals after breathlessly relating the 鈥淢ike Fikri鈥� story in great detail, the whole narrative is just a hypothetical used by the company to sell its product 鈥� completely fictional, right down to the made-up name Mike Fikri. But Palantir has been thriving, thanks mostly to the government, which is trying to make Palantir鈥檚 story 鈥� or something like it 鈥� come true.

It鈥檚 a compelling story, but there are lots of reasons to believe it will always be filed under fiction. A major and examining the question have all concluded that pattern-based data-mining 鈥� in which suspicious patterns of activity are flagged, cold, by computer algorithms 鈥� is very unlikely to be effective against terrorism.

Speaking of fiction, Palantir is named after a device in Lord of the Rings that allows characters to omnisciently see anything, anywhere. Ironically, in the novels, those who peer into a Palantir are often deceived by what they see. But Businessweek quotes the company鈥檚 CEO as saying they believe their mission is to 鈥減rotect the .鈥�

When we at the 老澳门开奖结果 hear 鈥渨e need lots of amazing new powers in order to protect you,鈥� our response is, 鈥渨atch out.鈥�

Now, there鈥檚 no problem with the government getting better at analyzing its own legitimately collected and stored terrorism-related intelligence. That鈥檚 what we want the government to do, and what the government should do, and should have done to thwart attackers like the 9/11 hijackers and the 鈥渦nderwear bomber鈥�

But the key word is 鈥渓egitimately.鈥� The problem comes when the government starts throwing in masses of information about the activities of innocent Americans. Unfortunately, we know that since 9/11, our security agencies have been irresistibly drawn towards mass surveillance as a principal strategy in the so-called 鈥渨ar on terror.鈥� Instead of working outward from known leads and actual evidence based on individualized suspicion, they have turned towards the misguided strategy of sifting through millions of innocent people鈥檚 communications and activities 鈥� boiling the ocean in the hopes of finding what is, essentially, a freak occurrence: somebody plotting an attack. (Unsurprisingly, the Government Accountability Office has found that DHS has of its data-mining systems.)

Businessweek also passes along government anecdotes about how this technology 鈥渉elped鈥� with various law enforcement successes. The government usually issues such stories to support privacy-invading technologies, but as always we have no way to verify them 鈥� or what 鈥渉elped鈥� really means, and whether it boils down to, 鈥渢he success would have happened even without the privacy-invading tool, but the tool did play some minor part.鈥�

Of course, in the end it鈥檚 not Palantir鈥檚 decision what data sets security agencies might plug into its software. We don鈥檛 know the degree of entanglement between the company and the agencies in terms of how the software is operated. And depending on the details of how it鈥檚 used, its deployment could be anything between a good, efficient use of government resources, and a true totalitarian nightmare, monitoring the activities of innocent Americans on a mass scale/collecting the records of those activities and leaving them open for suspicionless exploration by government analysts. Unfortunately, everything we know suggests that it is likely to be closer to the latter.

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