Mass surveillence and data mining is more suitable for population discrimination than for legal investigations 🧠
The NSA repeately uses the connect-the-dots metaphor to justify its surveillence activities. Again and again—after 9/11, after the underwear bomber, after the boston marathon bombings—the government is criticized for not connecting the dots. However, this is a terribly misleading metaphor. Connecting the dots in a coloring book is easy, because they are all numbered and visible. In real life, the dots can only be recognized after the fact.
Mass surveillence and data mining are much more suitable for tasks like population discrimination: finding people with political beliefs, people who are friends with certain individuals, people who are members of certain groups, and people who attend certain meetings or rallies. Those are all individuals of intrest to governments who are intent on social control. The reason data mining works for finding these people is that, like credit card fraudsters, political dissenents are likely to share a well defined profile. Additionally, under authoritarian rule the inevitable false alarms are less of a problem; charging innocent people with sedition instills fear in the populace.
References
- Schneier, Bruce. (2015). Data and Goliath The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World Chapter 11. Security (Location 2173). New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.