NSA Using 3 Hop Queries To Spy - Study Finds Everyone Online Only 4.7 Hops From Everyone Else

[matthewf]

[leveymg]

1. Let's call it what it is - universal terrorist profiling. "3 hops out" means a billion people

are investigated if the NSA determines there are 100,000 terrorist targets (100k X 100k X 100k). In fact, the NSA terrorist list contains 117,000 names. This indicates that over a billion people have been investigated in putting together and maintaining that list - that's massive profiling -- a number that includes most adult Americans and one-in-six cell phone users around the world.

Should you be profiled as a terrorist just because you talked to someone who talked to someone who talked to someone on that list? Is that a good use of scarce public resources at a time that American cities are going bankrupt?

To top it off, the program's supporters have yet to produce a single instance where the NSA program thwarted a single real terrorist attack, a real one (not one where the CIA and/or FBI were running agents provocateur). If they would simply do a better job of watching and controlling "our" terrorists (the ones the CIA knowingly let into the country and protected), these incidents going back to WTC '93 through 9/11, the Underwear Bomber, up to including the Boston Bombers would not happen.

[truth2power]

2. First of all, I'm convinced that this has nothing, let me repeat, NOTHING. AT. ALL. to do

with terrorism. Which raises the question of what the purpose is. I would welcome some, umm...."creative speculation", as to what their goal is. Controlling the populace and taking out the hubs, i.e. people like Chris Hedges, those who have significant influence over others, in case of a citizen revolt, makes sense to me.

Secondly, this is FARCE! Pure and simple. As Filipowicz says, it ends up with almost everybody connected to everyone else. In which case (and I'm no mathematician) it's a fruitless endeavor. Sort of like, if everyone is at fault, then no one is at fault.

Maybe some math nerd here on DU can parse this three-hop-query and its utility, for us.

[leveymg]

3. NSA and DHS support the Praetorian guard and mercenaries. They are make-work programs

for white conservatives - Keynesian stimulation programs that keep people who are hard-core GOP voters with essential skills employed. It's a build-out of the same Military Industrial Complex business model that has leeched off the manufactured fear of Communism and steadily bankrupted America since the end of the Second World War. This country has been living off the legacy of 1945, and it was all spent decades ago.

It's a way of sustaining the part of the US economy and political base -- the Praetorian Guard and auxillaries -- considered essential by the globalized 1% while the US is going through restructuring, like the Soviet Union did a couple decades earlier.