As per its usual method of releasing news it would rather not talk about, on Friday evening the White House released the news that it had, once again, gotten a rubberstamp approval from the FISA Court for the NSA to collect in bulk basically all your phone records. As you probably know, this is just the latest in a long series of reapprovals by the FISA Court, which needs to reauthorize the program for limited periods of time each time the previous rubber stamp "expires." What hasn't made much sense in all of this is that President Obama announced a year ago that he wanted to end the bulk collection program, and as many people pointed out, there was an easy way to do so: just don't ask the FISA Court to renew the authority. But, rather than do that, the administration just keeps on asking (and getting) approval.

The excuse given in the released statement is that the White House wants Congress to force its hand to stop asking:

As the White House said [link to WH statement], the Administration welcomes the opportunity to work with the new Congress to implement the changes the President has called for. Given that legislation has not yet been enacted, and given the importance of maintaining the capabilities of the telephony metadata program, the government has sought a reauthorization of the existing program, as modified by the changes the President directed in January.

And, yes, the official announcement says "[link to WH statement]" -- because, hey, they're posting on Friday evening and might as well start the drinking early or something. It's not like this stuff matters. The rest of that claim is similarly misleading. The metadata program has not been shown to be important in any way. In fact, basically everyone who has looked at it from outside the intelligence community, including two separate government review bodies has admitted that there aren't any examples of the program actually being useful. So, it's hard to see what's so "important" about it.

But, really, this is all ridiculous. This is the same White House that is getting criticized all over the place for a variety of moves to take "executive action" where Congress is deadlocked. And, yet, here's a situation where literally the White House has all the power in the world to stop the program it claims it wants stopped -- and it says it needs Congress to act? That's not even close to believable.

The one "noteworthy" aspect to this latest rubberstamping is the end date. The newly approved authority runs until June 1, 2015, which is the date at which Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act sunsets and would no longer be law. This program exists under Section 215, so the government can't continue to collect those phone records after June 1, unless something happens. That "something" is the renewal of Section 215, and you better believe that the next few months are going to be a full on fight by the intelligence community and its supporters to spread as much fear as possible about why this program absolutely must be renewed. As you hear the scare stories, just remember that despite using this program for almost a decade there still isn't a single example of it being useful.

As Techdirt has reported on the increasingly active world of commercial spyware, one name in particular has cropped up several times: Gamma, with its FinFisher suite of spyware products. In October last year, we reported that Privacy International had filed a criminal complaint against the company with the National Cyber Crime Unit of the UK's National Crime Agency. There's no update on that move, but it seems that a parallel action has had more success (pdf):

British-German surveillance company Gamma has been condemned by a human rights watchdog for its failure to adhere to human rights and due diligence standards, after a two year investigation into the company's sale of surveillance technology to Bahrain.

Here's what Privacy International says was happening in Bahrain:

The complaint alleged that Gamma sold its notorious FinFisher intrusion software product to Bahrain as early as 2009, after which time it was used by the Bahraini government to violate the human rights of three Bahraini nationals and human rights activists, Ala'a Shehabi, Husain Abdulla and Shehab Hashem.

You're probably wondering what the penalty is if you are found in breach of human rights in this way -- clearly a serious matter. Well, here it is:

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s UK National Contact Point (“"CP") concluded today that Gamma International should make changes to its business practices in order to ensure that in the future it respects the human rights of those affected by the surveillance technologies it sells.

Yes, you are told to do better next time. However, looking at things more positively, Privacy International points out:

Today's decision is the first time that the OECD has found a companies selling surveillance technologies to be in violation of human rights guidelines, and one of the most critical decisions ever issued by the OECD. In it, the NCP sets out in strong terms that Gamma has no human rights policies and due diligence processes that would protect against the abusive use of its products.

In other words, just as with the recent court victories against the UK government over its surveillance activities, what's important here is not so much the punishment -- or lack of it -- as the fact that for the first time a company selling invasive surveillance tools was condemned in this way. At the very least, it puts such companies on notice that they are being watched and will be hauled up before these kind of bodies for public shaming. Well, it's a start.

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This week, the Komodia/Superfish scandal got even worse. So bad, in fact, that the only appropriate response was sheer sarcasm, which Rich Kulawiec provided in our most insightful comment of the week:

Oh, come now, this isn't so bad

It's not like they did something really bad, something so destructive and damaging to the privacy and security of millions of people that it required immediate attention from federal law enforcement agencies combined with the threat of aggressive prosecution that could result in decades in prison...something like, oh, I don't know, downloading scientific research papers?

Meanwhile, when we looked at the creative abuses of wireless data caps, TheResidentSkeptic took second place for insightful by boiling it down to basics:

A different viewpoint

the most ham-fisted abuse of usage caps is simply that they exist.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we'll look at two other examples of people abusing power, the law, the market or all of the above. First up, after Total Wipes decided the word "download" meant infringement and proceeded to abuse the DMCA to take down all kinds of innocent sites, That One Guy opined on the inevitability of it all:

Natural result of a one-sided law

When a system or law has absolutely no penalty for abuse, it will be abused, and to expect anything less is foolish. Companies who file clearly bogus DMCA claims face no penalty whatsoever for doing so, even if the claims are blatantly false, yet the ones receiving them are still forced to treat them all as valid, unless they want to face harsh legal penalties.

If the DMCA was intended to be even remotely balanced, then there would be hard penalties for sending such obviously false claims, but as it stands, it's working exactly as it was intended to, completely favoring one side, at the cost of the other.

Next, though NSA director Admiral Mike Rogers said a lot of pretty worrying things about the NSA and privacy this week, Jason zeroed in on what might be the most offensive statement of them all:

Of everything said in that interview, what I personally found the most offensive was this:

“Be grateful that you live in a nation that is willing to have this kind of dialogue,” Rogers told the audience.

(from here)

We don't. We're having "this kind of dialogue"---such as it is---only because the government and intelligence community has been dragged, kicking and screaming and pronouncing the immediate doom of us all, into it.

I cycle through a lot of emotions as I keep up with all this... concern, mistrust, whatever. But comments like that make me genuinely angry.

Over on the funny side, we start out by returning to the Total Wipes story, where one anonymous commenter won first place with a different take on the whole situation:

What about me?

I have a site with a download link. Am I not important enough? Can I sue them for discrimination?

Next we head to the post about our brief Twitter exchange with revenge porn jerk/king of irony Craig Brittain, who is on a crusade against Google's supposed copyright infringement. Among the many amusing hypocrisies and general stupidities in his position, Somedumbgeek pointed out that his request for our coverage of the Perfect 10 lawsuit was among the most amusing:

So...

At the end, when he asked where he could read about it. Did it never occur to him that he could just google it?

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start by circling back to the story about wireless data caps, where orbitalinsertion gave an excellent name to the practice of letting big companies buy "sponsored data" to route around caps (and block smaller competition):

Deep Pocket Inspection.

Last but not least, we've got an anonymous commenter who has daringly taken the side of government officials demanding a magical, un-abusable backdoor key to encrypted devices. The engineers have insisted such a thing is fundamentally impossible, but clearly they were just too lazy to hammer out the code:

It's so simple

if (guy = good){
key.golden.letIn(True)
else
key.golden.letIn(False)
}

(There appear to be some syntax errors there, including the use of an assignment operator instead of a comparison one, which would make every "guy" register as "good" automatically. Which means this approach should be just about as secure as any genuine attempt would.)

That's all for this week, folks!

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010, we continued following the story of the school caught spying on students through webcams in their laptops, and the details were not looking good. Especially when we discovered the student in question was only guilty of eating candy.

This was also the time of ACTA negotiations, and when the internet chapter leaked, we got a look at how sneaky the negotiators were being. We learned which countries were fighting hardest against ACTA transparency, and European officials were getting concerned about the agreement. Meanwhile, the UK was supposedly backing down on the three strikes provisions of its Digital Economy Bill, but it turned out this was really just an exercise in rebranding and the bill still allowed for disconnection (that would last as long Peter Mandelson felt it should.)

You know that famous "I'm on a horse" ad for Old Spice, which the company continues riffing on to this day? Well, this was the year it originally aired during the Olympics (which, sidenote, was busy trying to get paid for tweets) leading us to hold it up as an example of how advertising is content. In a weirder attempt to enact that principle, EMI got State Farm to sponsor the embedding of OK GO videos (which were otherwise blocked), while the band's singer stepped up to point out that a lack of embedding hurts everyone.

Other upsets to the internet this week in 2010 included: the (secret) settling of the lawsuit between Perfect 10 and Amazon, the conviction of four Google executives on criminal charges over a YouTube video, the overblown freak-out over PleaseRobMe, the consideration of internet addiction for inclusion in the DSM and, perhaps most significant of all, the temporary takedown of the original Rickroll video.

Ten Years Ago

Looking back to 2005, you can clearly see the debates and practices that would lead to today's net neutrality battle. The vicious attacks on muni broadband by lobbyists were blatantly self-serving, and some companies went even further to outright prevent it. One group, fresh off of taking a Techdirt quote completely out of context to trash muni WiFi, went on to attack the idea of broadband-over-power-lines as well.

Lexmark got smacked down in its attempt to abuse the DMCA to block third-party ink cartridges, while HP was accused of building an expiry date into its cartridges. Apple, having recently launched its retail stores, was sued by Apple resellers and accused of unfair practices. And Google was accused of threatening French culture with its book scanning project by focusing on English books.

People were really beginning to realize how attached they were to their phones — and that losing them could mean losing friends. The rise of SMS was even threatening the greeting card industry. But, despite assumptions, constant texting seemed to be improving kids' language skills.

Fifteen Years Ago

If you do any work with web analytics today, you know that conversion rates are a key metric — but back in 2000 they were the new kid on the block. Then again, so were colour screens on PDAs and plenty of other high tech toys for grownups (though apparently not as many for kids).

British Airways announced that it would charge more for paper tickets, and we wondered if it would back down the way Delta did on a similar initiative. Palo Alto was experimenting with fiber to the home. Various magazines were looking at the state of things like digital currencies and weblogs like Techdirt (yes, still "weblogs"). And Techdirt itself briefly disappeared thanks to a DNS issue.

Eighty-Eight Years Ago

On February 23rd, 1927, Calvin Coolidge signed the new Radio Act into law, establishing the Federal Radio Commission that would, less than a decade later, become the FCC we all know so well.

Let me start this post off by noting that I'm a huge fan of crowdfunding and think that it's an amazing force for all sorts of good things in art, culture and innovation. That's part of the reason why we do a weekly awesome stuff post highlighting interesting (and sometimes awesome) crowdfunding projects. But, it should be noted that crowdfunding projects don't always turn out great. There are plenty of horror stories to go around -- some involving what appear to be outright fraud, certainly -- mostly just because project creators are way overly optimistic on their ability to achieve their goals. I've backed a few dozen projects, and I can only think of a handful that were delivered on time. To be honest, this doesn't bother me so much. What's much worse is that as projects go bad, the project creators tend to disappear, not updating people with the bad news, leading people to get angrier and angrier.

Kickstarter, for one, has long tried to make it clear that it is "not a store," but rather that you're backing a project, and there's risk associated with that -- including the risk that a project may fail. However, it's still disappointing to back a project and have it be totally disappointing. So, this week, I thought I'd ask people about the most disappointing crowdfunded projects they've seen or backed. And I'll reveal mine. Back in the summer of 2013, on one of our awesome stuffs I wrote about the HOT Watch, a new smart watch that had some interesting features, including the ability to hold your hand up to your ear and use your hand like a phone. The video for the project was super cheesy/infomercially, which scared me off, but I'd become somewhat fascinated with the possibilities for smartwatches, and at the last minute bought into it. The backers of the project swore up and down, left, right and center, that the project would ship in time for Christmas in 2013. Right up until basically the end of the year the company insisted it would be shipping. It's now February of 2015 and I still don't have mine. Because I just don't care any more, I've asked them for a refund and they haven't replied, which is pretty much what I expected. Some people appear to have received theirs -- but I haven't and it's now 15 months late, and the market for smartwatches has moved way past the HOT Watch.

Lesson learned: crowdfunder beware.

Another, similar project, which (thankfully) I did not back is the Lima, which was a little device that was supposed to enable you to very easily set up your own personal cloud with USB devices at home. That presentation was super slick, and I was tempted to back it, but the pricing seemed a little steep, and I'm glad I didn't because while it also promised delivery by December 2013, at last check, it also has not delivered at all, and there are tons of people demanding refunds. I had mentioned the Lima in another awesome stuff post, and the company reached out to me saying the team wanted to send me a postcard (?!?!) as a thank you. I told the person not to bother, but the company still found our office address and sent it anyway. It seems like, rather than sending out post cards to people who don't want them, they could have put time into working on the product.

Anyway, this isn't to knock crowdfunding, or even these two projects in particular. It's just to note that there are risks associated with crowdfunding, and certain projects turn out to be flops, so you need to be aware. In the meantime, would love to hear about crowdfunding flops that you have backed (or luckily avoided...).

In the long, convoluted and complex legal battles facing Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, there was some bizarre stuff that happened late last year. As you may recall, early on, the US government seized basically all of his stuff and money. Dotcom has made efforts to get some of it returned, as it's tough to fight the most powerful government in the world when it's holding onto all of your money. Keep in mind from our previous discussions on asset seizure and forfeiture, the government can basically seize whatever it wants, just by claiming it was somehow related to a crime, but the seizure is only a temporary process. If the government wants to keep it, it then needs to go through a separate process known as civil asset forfeiture, which is effectively the government suing the assets. Back in July, the US government moved to forfeit everything it had seized from Dotcom in a new lawsuit with the catchy name USA v. All Assets Listed In Attachment A, And All Interest, Benefits, And Assets Traceable Thereto. As you may have guessed, Attachment A [pdf] is basically all of Kim Dotcom's money and posessions.

Back in November, the DOJ argued that it should get to keep all of Kim Dotcom's money and stuff because he's a "fugitive", which is a bizarre and ridiculous way to portray Kim Dotcom, who has been going through a long and protracted legal process over his potential extradition from New Zealand (though he's offered to come to the US willingly if the government lets him mount a real defense by releasing his money). Dotcom's lawyers told the court that it's ridiculous to call him a fugitive, but it appears that Judge Liam O'Grady didn't buy it.

In a ruling [pdf] that was just posted a little while ago, O'Grady sided with the government, and gave the DOJ all of Dotcom's things. You can read the full reasoning here and it seems to take on some troubling logic. Dotcom's lawyers pointed out, as many of us have, that there is no secondary copyright infringement under criminal law, but the judge insists that there's enough to show "conspiracy to commit copyright infringement." But the reasoning here is bizarre. Part of it is the fact that Megaupload did remove links to infringing content from its top 100 downloads list. To me, that seems like evidence of the company being a good actor in the space, and not trying to serve up more infringing downloads. To Judge O'Grady and the DOJ, it's somehow evidence of a conspiracy. No joke.

The government has alleged that the conspirators knew that these files were infringing copyrights, as evidenced by their exclusion of infringing files from the "Top 100" list. The "Top 100" list purported to list the most frequently downloaded files on Megaupload.... According to the government, an accurate list would have consisted almost entirely of infringing content, so the claimants "carefully curated" the list to make the site look more legitimate.... Additionally, the claimants regularly told copyright holders, including many U.S.-based organizations, that they would remove infringing content, when in actuality they only removed particular links to the files.... The actual infringing files remained on the Mega-controlled servers and could be accessed from other links.

As for that latter part, there are tons of perfectly legitimate reasons to only remove the links and not the underlying files. If Megaupload was doing deduping, then some version of the same file could be perfectly legitimate. Let's take an example: say that you and I have an MP3 of a Katy Perry song. I upload it to Megaupload to keep as a backup. You upload it to distribute to the world. Megaupload dedupes it, and just has the file stored one time. Your link could be potentially infringing if you distribute unauthorized copies, whereas my copy may be a legitimate personal backup. Given that, Megaupload should only delete the links that are called out as infringing, rather than the underlying files, which -- depending on their use -- may or may not be infringing. But the court just takes the DOJ's version and says "good enough for me."

The court also has no problem with the fact that most of the assets aren't in the US, noting that since some of the "conspiracy" took place in the US, that's good enough. It more or less brushes off the concerns raised by Dotcom and the other defendants that this appears to violate existing treaties between New Zealand and the US -- basically saying that because Dotcom refuses to come to the US, it's not "punitive." Huh? On top of that, the judge says that taking all of Dotcom's assets shouldn't interfere with the legal process in New Zealand, because the New Zealand courts could (yeah right) reject the DOJ's request after this ruling to hand over Dotcom's assets.

Then we get to the whole "fugitive" bit. Judge O'Grady notes that the statute does allow him to call anyone who "declines to enter" the United States a fugitive, and argues that Dotcom fits that description. Furthermore, he actually argues that Dotcom's offer to the DOJ to come willingly to the US if the money is freed for his defense actually works against Dotcom, and gives weight to the fugitive claim:

As demonstrated, Dotcom need not have previously visited the United States in order to meet the prerequisites of § 2466. The statute is satisfied where the government shows that the claimant is on notice of the criminal charges against him and refuses to "enter or reenter" the country with the intent to avoid criminal prosecution. Because the court assesses intent under the totality of the circumstances, it is certainly relevant that Dotcom has never been to the United States and that he has lived in New Zealand since 2011, where he resides with his family. This tends to show that he has other reasons for remaining in New Zealand besides avoiding criminal prosecution. However, the existence of other motivations does not preclude a finding that he also has a specific intent to avoid criminal prosecution. Dotcom's statements, made publicly and conveyed by his attorneys to the government, indicate that he is only willing to face prosecution in this country on his own terms. See Technodyne, 753 F.3d at 386 (2d Cir. 2014) ("The district court was easily entitled to view those [requests for bail], evincing the [claimants'] desire to face prosecution only on their own terms, as a hallmark indicator that at least one reason the [claimants] declined to return in the absence of an opportunity for bail was to avoid prosecution"). Dotcom has indicated through his statements that he wishes to defend against the government's criminal charges and litigate his rights in the forfeiture action. If it is truly his intent to do so, then he may submit to the jurisdiction of the United States.

In short, damned if you do, damned if you don't. This is the justice system, ladies and gentlemen. The DOJ gets to seize and keep all your money, and merely asking for access to it to fight to show your innocence is used as a reason to allow the DOJ to keep it. So he comes to the US and has to fight criminal charges without his own money, or he stays in New Zealand and the government uses it as an excuse to keep all the money. How is any of this even remotely fair? Where is the "due process" in totally handicapping Dotcom from presenting a defense?

Again, it is entirely possible that Dotcom and the others broke the law -- though the case certainly does look pretty weak to me. But what's really astounding is how far the DOJ appears to want to go to make it absolutely impossible for Dotcom to present a full defense of his case.

It's been talked about for a while, but on Friday, the White House released a draft of what it's calling a "Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights." Conceptually, that sounds like a decent idea, but in practice? Not so much. Yes, it's just a draft, but it's got a lot of vague hand-waving, and basically no one seems all that thrilled about it, either from the privacy advocate side or the tech company side. Also, it doesn't even address the biggest privacy concern of all: government surveillance and snooping.

Privacy is, of course, one of those things that can be rather tricky to regulate, for a variety of reasons. Many attempts turn out badly, and don't really do much to actually protect privacy -- while sometimes blocking legitimate and useful innovations. While we're big supporters of protecting one's privacy we're at least somewhat concerned about legislation that appears to be pretty sloppy, and not all that well defined or thought out. This feels like a "we needed to do something, so here's something" kind of draft bill, rather than a "here's a legitimate problem, and here's how to fix it." It feels like a lost opportunity.

Some people are naturally skinny and able to eat almost anything they want without gaining weight. Obviously, there are also plenty of folks who need to watch their diets very carefully and exercise regularly to prevent unhealthy weight gain. The causes for obesity are not well understood, and while many observers like to say it's obvious that people need to expend more calories than they consume, the challenge of doing so isn't as simple as it sounds for many. There aren't any miracle diets or drugs, but as we study obesity and understand it more, there could be more palatable treatments someday.

• Mitochondrial genetics could explain metabolic changes with age and with different environmental conditions. Large scale studies of mitochondrial changes in city populations are just beginning, and researchers will try to make sense of how cell genetics influence health. [url]
• A rare chromosomal abnormality can cause Prader-­Willi syndrome -- a condition that can be fatal and cruel because its victims can literally eat to death. People with this condition have no sensation of satiety, so they can eat until their stomachs rupture. [url]
• There's evidence to support the idea that intestinal microbes correlate with obesity. A fecal transplant from an overweight daughter to a mother suffering from an intestinal infection resulted in the infection going away -- but also a weight gain problem for the mother that previously didn't exist. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Show of hands: who remembers the North Face vs. South Butt saga? Ah, yes, the trademark battle built perfectly for those of us with a sophomoric sense of humor, fully entertained us three years ago, when an upstart clothier attempted to be funny and the humorless lawyers at North Face cried consumer confusion. While the claim of confusion was as laughable as the rest of the story, the court proceedings saw South Butt agree to change its brand name. Which it did...to Butt Face, because why the hell not? South Butt/Butt Face, after all, was pimping its own publicity by streisanding its way through court proceedings, all thanks to North Face refusing to put down the litigation stick.

Perhaps snowboarder Casey Sherr was taking notes at the time for his eventual release in 2013 of his Ass Armor clothing company, which of course has Under Armour's shorts in a twist.

The Ft. Lauderdale company faces a trademark infringement lawsuit from Under Armour — and plans to fight. The $3 billion Baltimore athletic apparel maker also accused the snowboard shorts maker of unfair competition and cybersquatting for using the name Ass Armor and a tagline that could be confused with Under Armour's. The defendant copies Under Armour by using similar lettering and putting the Ass Armor name along the shorts' waistband, the lawsuit says.

"Making matters worse, similar to Under Armour's well-known and widely promoted Protect This House tagline mark, defendants use, advertise and promote their Ass Armor mark, name and products… in connection with the Protect Your Assets tagline," says the lawsuit, filed last month in U.S. District Court in Maryland.

Could the well-known Under Armour brand and imagery be somehow confused with Ass Armor and its logo?

Frankly, it stretches credulity to believe that such confusion is likely. More likely this is simply the latest in a long line of battles Under Armour's legal team has staged for itself, having previously gone after Skechers, Salt Armour Inc., and others. Much like the South Butt case, it's woefully likely that all the courts will see is the obvious play on some of the more generic aspects of Under Armour's marks rather than actually weighing any real concerns over customer confusion.

What's clear is that trademark wasn't designed to keep this kind of stuff tied up in court battles like this. Unlike South Butt, Ass Armor appears to be willing to fight the battle.

"We strongly believe the lawsuit filed by Under Armour has no merit," said Scherr, president of the company that makes only the padded shorts, in an email Thursday. "Ass Armor has spent months fighting with Under Armour in front of the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board and then, without notice, Under Armour filed this matter in federal court. We believe this is a classic David and Goliath battle. As David, we intend to fight."

Protecting its assets is part of the Ass Armor way, after all.

As Mike pointed out recently, thanks to Snowden (and possibly other sources), we now know the NSA, with some help from GCHQ, has subverted just about every kind of digital electronic device where it is useful to do so -- the latest being hard drives and mobile phones. That's profoundly shocking when you consider what most non-paranoid observers thought the situation was as recently as a couple of years ago. However, given that's how things stand, there are a couple of interesting ramifications.

First, that the recent attempts by politicians to demonize strong encryption look like an attempt to cover up the fact that most digital systems are already vulnerable using one or more of the techniques that have been revealed over the last year or two. That is, the NSA and GCHQ can probably access most digital content stored or transmitted in any way -- either because the encryption itself or the end-points have been compromised. Even standalone strong encryption systems like PGP -- thought still to be immune to direct attacks -- can be circumvented by breaking into the systems on which they are used.

Perhaps the dark hints that encryption could be banned or backdoored are simply part of a cynical ploy to present such an appalling vision of what could happen, that we gladly accept anything less extreme without complaint. In fact, the authorities have no intention of attempting anything so stupid -- it would put all online business at risk -- because they don't need to: they already have methods to access everything anyway.

That being the case, there is another important question. If the NSA and other parties do have ways of turning practically every digital electronic device into a system for spying on its users, that essentially means there is no criminal organization in the world -- ranging from the so-called "terrorist" ones that are used to justify so much bad policy currently, to the "traditional" ones that represent the bulk of the real threat to society -- that is not vulnerable to being infiltrated and subverted by government agencies.

And yet we don't see this happen. Drug cartels thrive; people trafficking is surging; the smuggling of ivory and endangered animals is profitable as never before. Similarly, despite the constant and sophisticated monitoring of events across the Middle East, the rise of Islamic State evidently took the US and its allies completely by surprise. How is it that global criminality has not been brought to its knees, or that such massive geopolitical developments were not picked up well in advance -- and nipped in the bud?

One obvious explanation for this pattern is that just as the attackers of London, Boston, Paris and Copenhagen were all known to the authorities, so early tell-tale signs of the rise of Islamic State were detected, but remained drowned out by the sheer volume of similar and confounding information that was being gathered. Similarly, it is presumably easy to create huge stores of information on drug bosses or people smugglers -- but hard to find enough personnel to analyze and act on that data mountain.

Now that we have a better idea of the extraordinary reach of the global surveillance being carried out at all times, the failure of that activity to make us safer by countering criminal activity, at whatever scale, becomes all the more striking. It's time the intelligence agencies accepted that the "collect it all" approach is not just failing, but actually exactly wrong: what we need is not more surveillance, but much less of it and much better targeted.

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