‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/may/10/we-kill-people-based-metadata/

by Libertatea • 12 years ago

177 22 12 years ago

nybooks.com

Sambdala• 12 years ago

"Stop being so paranoid. Nobody's interested in reading your emails.

Besides, they're only collecting metadata."

msandford4• 12 years ago

Okay so why can't we get any reporting with any numeric literacy?

How many people does the average person make contact with in a 5 year time span? Let's call this number X for hop 1.

How many people does each of the people in X then make contact with in the same 5 years? If we assume that on the whole people know ABOUT as many people as others, we can also call that number X for hop 2.

Now of course there's going to be overlap, out of X people somewhere between 0% and probably 70% might overlap between any one person of interest, hop 1 and hop 2.

Let's say that on average there's a 40% overlap. And let's call the Sweep(X) the number of people that get caught up in surveillance as a result of a single suspected terrorist.

Sweep(X) = 0.4 * X (first hop) x 0.4 * X (second hop)

Sweep(X) = 0.16 * X ^ 2

That's quadratic and as anyone who knows math, and especially people who know about Big-Oh notation, it's bad because Sweep(X) grows much faster than X does.

But how big is X? Well we can look to Dunbar's number to give us somewhere to start. Wikipedia says that it's between 100 and 250 but most people use 150 as a reasonable approximation. Of course that's STABLE relationships, not acquaintances, friends-of-friends, or anything like that. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume the 150 number and then assume that you probably make contact with one random person every week. Over 5 years, that's another 250. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

So if we assume that X is 150 + 250 = 400 what do we get?

Sweep(400) = 0.16 * 400 * 400 = 25,600 let's just say 25k for short.

Now there are around 300 million people in the US. 300mm / 25k = 12000. That means that the NSA need only find 12,000 people (on average) to get all the call records for everyone in the US for the last 5 years.

It gets worse, though. What happens if you make contact with TWO random people every week? Then X = 150 + 500 = 650

Sweep(650) = 0.16 * 650 * 650 = 67,600. 300mm / 67k = 4477 people suspected of nefarious deeds in order to gain all call records.

As you can see this gets really out of hand really fast. And that's why I'm a bit upset that nobody's doing the math around the "two hops" argument because I assure you that the folks at the NSA aren't rolling over and giving up. This is something that SOUNDS reasonable but in actuality means little/no reform whatsoever.

EDIT: wikipedia link

k2enemy• 12 years ago

It is actually much worse than that. You're assuming a uniform distribution over the numbers that people call, but there are some numbers that a significant fraction of the population call. For example, how many people are three hops away from a "target" through Comcast, Time Warner, Dell, etc?

Of course the NSA would probably ignore these spurious connections to generate leads for an actual investigation. But I assume that they would use them to create the largest possible list of people that they are "allowed" to collect and store information on.

msandford4• 12 years ago

Yes I was being conservative so that few reasonable people could challenge the assumptions I made.

But you're completely correct. I bet Amazon gets you the second hop to at least 20% of the whole country. Once you add in all the 800, 866, etc phone numbers I'd imagine that two hops gets you to very nearly every person in the US with a starting pool of perhaps only a few dozen people.

I could easily see someone's job being to figure out which (presumably innocent) people to "target" for the sake of ensuring a full or nearly full data collection. You know, to make things more efficient. "So we don't always have to go crawling to judges and the phone companies every single time we think something bad might be going down."

This two hops thing really is a scam.

j2kun2• 12 years ago

It could be because the only people who want to read an article that defines functions and expects them to be familiar with Big-O notation can reach these conclusions without reading the article in the first place.

That being said, it's generally believed to be (or measured) that the social network of the world is a sparse graph. So the fact that the sweep function is quadratic in the degree of a vertex is irrelevant. Using your notation, X is bounded by a constant for all intents and purposes.

In other words, there's nothing inherently bad about the quadratic behavior, and "knowing math" doesn't give you much except perhaps a false sense of intuition. The arithmetic (and your ad-hoc estimates) just works out in favor of your argument. Which is not all that surprising conditioned on the fact that you posted an argument :)

msandford4• 12 years ago

Sure, I'm not suggesting that the author give it the kind of treatment I did. Simply that the notion "oh two hops is better right?!" isn't valid.

Yes social networks are sparse. With 300 million Americans and the capacity to know perhaps only a few thousand, yes, things will be sparse. But that doesn't mean you cannot construct a spanning tree of that sparse graph. My PC isn't directly connected to Amazon or Netflix or really anyone of interest. But in a couple of dozen hops I'm connected to just about anyone in the world. Sparse doesn't mean unconnected.

The "badness" of the quadratic is that the "two hops" restriction SEEMS like a real restriction when in reality, it's not. It's bad in that the "two" in "two hops" sounds linear but the effects are quadratic. The quadratic-ness isn't inherently bad, I would never argue that. But the deception is.

mturmon• 12 years ago

The N.Y. Review has been very strong in reporting in depth and critically on the post-9/11 security state, and (before the mainstream media caught on) on the thoughtless run-up to the Iraq invasion.

Mark Danner has been writing a series of articles there re-examining the Cheney legacy (two recent ones are here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/mar/06/darknes... and http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/apr/03/dick-ch...). They have been just brutal.

lotsofmangos• 12 years ago

Metadata has turned into such a slimy word. Metadata isn't a type of data, it is a description of the relationship between two sets of data.

ska• 12 years ago

That is far to narrow: metadata is literally "data about data", be it structural or descriptive.

It's also worth remembering that this is not categorical, particularly for descriptive metadata. In one context a piece of information may be metadata, in another data.

unclebucknasty3• 12 years ago

It's odd that in all of what is essentially the fallout from 9/11--two wars, subversion of American rights, spying on Americans, torture, rendition, massive security/surveillance state, etc.--no one seems to have ever seriously asked "why do these people want to kill us".

Beyond the quotable but facile "they hate us for our freedom" line, there hasn't been much real discussion of this sort.

And, here, as we parse the latest round of bills, legal interpretations, infringed freedoms, etc., there is still no such earnest discussion about why we find ourselves in this position in the first place. It's just assumed that this is somehow where we "should" find ourselves, and the only question is how much further we should go in our response to our inevitable position.

EDIT: At this point, I would go beyond the question of why these people want to kill us and ask who and how many are there who actually do want to kill us?

mpyne2• 12 years ago

no one seems to have ever seriously asked "why do these people want to kill us".

Plenty of people have asked that question. That the answer isn't what you expect doesn't mean the question wasn't asked.

It turns out that the goal is to establish (or rather, re-establish) the Caliphate, or at least some twisted takfiri version of it.

In order to establish the Caliphate you need somewhere to put it -- namely, the Muslim countries of the Middle East.

But the countries already have states running the show. In AQ's viewpoint, they are "the near enemy". The near enemies have supporters too, including the U.S. (which was "the far enemy"). Other enemies include the United Nations (both since the UN Charter is incompatible with takfiri Sharia extremism, but also because the UN recognizes Israel), Shi'a Muslims, etc.

In one of the key decision points for OBL post-Gulf War, he decided to focus on the far enemy first instead of the near enemies.

At this point, the "crime" of the U.S. wasn't drones or bombing brown babies or anything so snide. The U.S.'s only crime was putting infidel soldiers on Arab soil to evict Iraq from Kuwait, and for maintaining regional stability for what I'm sure were completely self-serving reasons that provided no benefit whatsoever to the rest of the world.

Accordingly AQ attacked the U.S.: The 1993 World Trade Center bombings... the 1995 "Bojinka" airline bombing plots (yes, plural) that was only discovered by accident at the last second by an alert Philippine policewoman... the 1998 embassy bombings... the 2000 attack on USS Cole in Aden, Yemen.

The U.S. response was remarkably restrained throughout this entire period. Despite hundreds of Kenyans alone being killed by AQ in the 1998 bombings, the U.S. response was limited to dropping cruise missiles on known AQ training camps in Afghanistan and a chemical production facility in Sudan that showed evidence of working with AQ to produce nerve gas. The evidence was not ironclad, mind, but that was it: No boots on the ground, no roving drone patrols, no NSA massive surveillance efforts.

The problem for AQ wasn't what the U.S. was doing to the rest of the world by 2000, the problem was that the U.S. wasn't doing enough. AQ had somehow failed to get America's serious attention, and had failed to evict America completely from the Middle East, so they decided that they had to go bigger. And they did.

So while the facile "they hate us for our freedom" line is not the answer, it's not far off: They attack because Muslims still live in either approximately free societies, or tyrannies under the wrong dictator (i.e. apostate regimes). There will be no end unless they establish the Caliphate, and even that doesn't necessarily represent the end, since the stated goal of this new caliphate by Ayman al-Zawahiri is to extend jihad against the U.S. and the West.

If you want to research yourself the motives of the various and many insurgent/terrorist groups out there then there's certainly no lack of material, from the very many people who have asked the same question you say has never been asked. I'd recommend going through some of it. Articles asking (and trying to answer) this question have been published since long before 9/11. Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" article dates to Bosnia.

unclebucknasty3• 12 years ago

I appreciate your thoughtful response and I have, in fact, heard this mentioned over the years. I am not sure that it is entirely accepted as the rationale (and, in fact, it has been disputed by some), but it has certainly be suggested.

I should probably have been clearer in my initial question. While there has been some discussion about in different circles regarding the genesis of this "problem", it has largely been muted. At a minimum, the volume and quality of earnest discussion has been remarkably limited relative to the importance of such discussion. Instead, we get pablum such as "they hate us for our freedom", even while we drone strike, destroy, and kill.

Remarkably, the theory that you repeated fits with this pablum as it puts virtually no emphasis on our actions, save for a passing mention or two. Somehow, even with a long and complex history of involvement in the region, we magically have no responsibility for any of wha is happening, save for being free and not Muslim. I find that absolutely incredible and profoundly myopic. Still, even if one can somehow remove the notion of consequences for previous behavior as a cause of 9/11 and what preceeded, and also manage to detach all responsibility from the West, there should be little doubt that our current course of action (yes, including drone strikes), provides indisputable cause for real grievances borne of our actions and, potentially, a generation of terrorists that modern history has yet to see.

Or, to put it in your terms, unless the goal is to kill every single Muslim or sympathizer who could have either answered the call for the Caliphate or been affected by the loss of a loved one who was presumed to have done such, then it seems that our current course is either exceptionally stupid or specifically designed to create perpetual conflict.

But, back to my original point: all of this that we are discussing here is incredibly important and lurks beneath the surface. It has brought us down this path of surveillance, etc., yet it is not questioned or discussed. Think of how fantastically stupid it is that we are in such a reactionary mode that we no longer question key assumptions regarding why we are doing what we are doing in the first place. Even if you believed that it's all about the Caliphate, shouldn't that single word be part of our daily discusion for as long as we ar at war, drone striking, and spying on Americans? Shouldn't we be openly discussing what it means and how we might work to not radicalize members of that community? Shouldn't there be a sober assesment of Western policy and how it might intersect with legitimate complaints and even radical ideas? This, instead of an attitude that "they hate us for our freedom", followed by more drone strikes, spying on Americans, etc.?

Apologies for length. Just hoping to better make my point.

trendoid• 12 years ago

You should probably read this first as a starting point: http://www.newstatesman.com/2014/04/challenge-islam

jacquesm• 12 years ago

"they hate us for our freedom"

Besides being not true in principle (they couldn't care less if you're free) even if they did it would stop working as soon as you're no longer free.

In reality it is much simpler than that: The US has (rightly or wrongly) become the de-facto superpower and has been projecting its power all over the globe with abandon. That creates a (very predictable) backlash.

So those that want to kill you want to kill you out of sheer frustration with having their plots foiled and their ability to operate restricted and they figure (rightly) that the way to strike back is to target the home country and hope for the leaders of the country to mess up and alienate themselves from their allies.

From that point of view 911 is mission accomplished.

bostik• 12 years ago

And, here, as we parse the latest round of bills, legal interpretations, infringed freedoms, etc., there is still no such earnest discussion about why we find ourselves in this position in the first place.

Some of it is possibly history going through its usual cycle. As a corollary to Santayana's legendary quote: the only thing people ever learn from history is that nobody ever learns anything from history.

For an interesting look on the history of modern terrorism, I recommend watching at least the first two parts of this German stand-up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4H_E8b-qmo . Yes, it's inflammatory, and yes, it's politically slanted. That's the point.

The way to find unexpected things in common wisdom is to look at it from a different angle.

sakopov• 12 years ago

I find this totally hilarious. The NSA can come out and say whatever the hell they want and everyone just buys it because they don't have a choice. What are we going to do, go look at their data logs to make sure they're not lying? Oh no we don't record the contents of your calls. What a bunch of bullshit. You think any spying has stopped since Snowden revealed that NSA is looking up your ass when you're dropping one? This is hilarious because it's so absurd.

dan_bk• 12 years ago

You think any spying has stopped since Snowden

I remember that "internal" NSA memo which tried to reassure the employees, basically saying "don't worry, we'll just winter the storm, it will pass...".

And that's exactly what they're doing: Wait. And it's all that's necessary, because everybody has already shut up and is anxious about the next iPhone.

‘We Kill People Based on Metadata’

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