NSA Admits It Has Too Much Info
from the search-smarter,-not-harder dept
For a while now we’ve been complaining about the various proposals from government agencies to have more access to any sort of communications. It’s been pointed out that simply adding more information to the pile doesn’t help things. In fact, it makes it harder to find the information that is actually important. Now the NSA is giving SAIC nearly $300 million to build them a new system to better search through the info – as they’ve realized they simply can’t find what they need. They even admit that they’re drowning in information. Of course, what doesn’t seem to occur to them is that maybe they shouldn’t collect so much info, and should be more careful about what types of information they do collect. If they focused on smarter data collection instead of smarter searching, this wouldn’t be a problem.
Comments on “NSA Admits It Has Too Much Info”
Intelligence gathering
The problem with that is that in intelligence gathering, you kind of have to just collect lots and lots and have lots of people go through it. You never know how the ‘bad guys’ will communicate their information, so you’ve gotta have all of your bases covered. Good to see this, though – finally an organization has been mentioned many times here.
No Subject Given
I’m totally for privacy, and am very anti-data collection, but *not* collecting data because they have too much would be short sighted. Some of the most interesting and useful variations of data mining were not originally intended when that data was collected- http://labs.google.com/ for example.