[leodeid]

That was a rather entertaining article, both for the story, but also for the subtext about the dangers of SIGINT-only intelligence gathering. The NSA hoovers up everything it can get automatically, but that data is used without context. In this story, the context of being a diplomat, the context of being in Pakistan, and the context of being conversational partners with a HUMINT source.

I'm sure the NSA is (at this point) aware of this problem, and trying to make the collected data more context-aware. I wonder to what extent the content of just phone calls, texts, emails, and facebook posts can be used to learn small-group dynamics. (Like the fact that the people of E-7 in the story consider talks of a Pakistani coup to be normal idle dinner talk.)

[guerrilla]

You might be interested in Robert Baer's books for a perspective on this problem within the CIA. HUMINT seems to have been drclining significantly over the last few decades and it's the opinion of some in these organisations that this is a tragedy and won't work.

[a3n]

Yeah, I guess we could and should do that.

The problem, though, is that it will always be in the context important to an algorithm. But we don't surveille or converse to serve algorithms (Facebook and Google notwithstanding). We do it to promote human needs.

The most important context is human context, and the best human context interpreter is humans. The fact that each individual human emphasizes different parts of a context is a feature, not a bug.

[JumpCrisscross]

Imagine you're a bureaucrat with little to no oversight. Your power is a function of your budget. You can hire a thousand people for $500,000 each or spend $1bn on a single contractor. With the former you have a thousand people to manage. With the latter, one.