Discuss HN: Who works for the NSA and why?
As the various Snowden related leaks have come to light I've begun to wonder who exactly is building this tech? The hackers that break into Google's data lines, the programmers building things like PRISM. Do these people really believe that they are doing the right thing? Are they mainly blackhat hackers that are in it for the money?
As a side note: One of the government's explanations for why they were unable to stop the September 11 attacks is that there was just too much information, too many signals. Won't all of this massive data collection make it worse? Regardless of the tools they have to sort and analyze it. Can anyone really sort that much information?
2 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 20.9 ms ] threadI don't understand the attitude of people who can't believe anyone would work on $SECRET_PROJECT. Not everyone shares your worldview. Try to pretend, for a second, that you really, genuinely, trust the people in charge, and they come to you and say "hey Zac, can you build this? It checks everyone's emails, and only spits out those that are really likely to be related to terrorism. We never look at the rest, even if they're juicy or about drug deals or whatever, because that's not within our purview". If you actually trust the person asking that, maybe that's an easy thing to say yes to.
To your side note: if your problem is "too much information" the appropriate solution is better methods for looking through it, not deciding to collect a tenth as much next year. As for whether they can sort that much...google does a decent job with the internet.