[LINK] Snowden, Inteligence Gathering, Indonesia and Embarrassment

[Frank O'Connor]

I find it interesting that nobody, either in government or in the media, seems to be asking the more interesting (and possibly useful) questions regarding the current 'crisis'.

I mean some coverage of little numbers like:

# Just because we CAN collect it, does it mean we SHOULD collect it? There comes a point at which 'defending freedom' becomes 'constructing a police state' ... and we should be very wary of the dividing line.

# Can we usefully analyse the vast amount of data we collect, or are we simply collecting it for its own sake? Are we missing crucial information and datasets because they're buried in the morass of useless data that we collect?

# If so, should we be narrowing our data acquisition to more useful and targeted sources ... determined by how said data has been useful and indicative of threat in the past?

# Are our intelligence agencies getting any more accurate, reliable, valid and useful with their predictions as a result of collecting these masses of data?

# It seems 'every man and his dog' associated with intelligence agencies now has access to the data, and that data partitioning and security generally is lacking. In the light of WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden shouldn't we be doing a serious cost-benefit analysis on collecting and holding the masses of data that seem to be available to a cast of hundreds of thousands, if not millions? It seems obvious that the amount of data collected (because eventually such collection becomes obvious to technically informed users), the various channels or choke points that data is collected through,  and access to said data needs to be rigorously controlled.

The government, the media and commentators seem to be assuming a hell of a lot with regards to our intelligence fraternity and its practices that probably shouldn't be assumed. 

The bottom line is that some religious nutters drive a couple of planes into a city building, and we throw away all common sense, all our hard won freedoms, all the rights and privileges we had previously attained in our respective societies, and hit out in a largely undirected manner for the sake of it it seems (largely when directed to by those same intelligence agencies citing inaccurate little numbers like 'weapons of mass destruction', the non-existent at the time 'Al Qaeda in Iraq' and the like that were backed up by their 'data') ... all in the interests of an illusive absolute security that's simply not possible in any given world under any set of real-world circumstances.

Despite access to huge amounts of data, these people have failed to predict 9/11 and other terrorist incidents since, they instigated/recommended  a war against a Godless socialist secular state that was actually an adversary of their primary enemy rather than an ally that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars and probably had a lot to do with accelerating the GFC, they (together with the authorities generally) failed to detect or predict the greatest economic crisis in 70 years ... despite all the signs and data being out there, they failed to protect their own raw data from low level contractors and operatives, they intrude on the privacy and rights of the people they are supposed to protect ... and now they impact on our foreign policy, trade and good relations with a neighbouring country and relatively crucial ally because they thought tapping the phones of that country's elite was a good idea and that they'd never get caught.

When are THEY going to be held accountable? When are WE going to do a cost-benefit analysis?