They don't "pretty much show active surveillance on individuals". Even the NSA doesn't have the human intelligence analyst bandwidth for that. The Snowden leaks show pretty expansive collection of data that could be examined by analysts, along with tools to make the analysis of that data even easier, but unless I've missed one there's nothing in the leaks demonstrating "automated SWATting of a house".
And you think the analyst who took the results of a regression analysis on 7 words has a deep theoretical and practical understanding of the statistical models used and their weaknesses. Ok. It's possible.
Would you bet your life on it? How about other people's lives on it? It's an easier bet to make but be careful that the stakes are as limited as you think they are, huh?
I think it's far more likely that the analyst has what we used to call "common sense" than they that have a master's degree in statistics, I'll admit. Of course Turing and his compatriots at Bletchley Park managed to win the war without all of them having a degree in stats, so maybe it's not actually the critical underpinning of the use of intelligence that you think it is.
Likewise since the NSA doesn't actually have LE working for it they'd have to pass off the juicy bits to some Federal law enforcement agency and convince some non-zero subset of that agency in order to "auto-SWAT" a house.
So yes, this is actually among the easier of bets I'll ever have to make. More difficult ones would involve policy on what should be a crime, what taxes should be, and how the foreign policy of the U.S. should be directed.
Turing and his compatriots weren't using statistical models of which they had no understanding to order raids in peace time.
Turing, yeah, he probably understood stats being a codebreaker and all. Not sure what you think codebreaking is. But I guess the idea that Turing would know his stats isn't common sense, common sense is usually prejudice writ large anyway. Suggesting otherwise as a justification for raiding someone based on a stat analysis of an academic paper hinging on 7 words used is just so silly I can scarcely credit it. Factual underpinning is ridiculous then build fallacies of logic built on that. Well done.
Do you volunteer at being an apologist? What would be so bad that you wouldn't be able to make excuses for it. Seriously?
> What would be so bad that you wouldn't be able to make excuses for it.
Consider the nature of the environment.
On HN when I see things that I agree with, I upvote them. Often I have nothing better to add, as very good points have already been made, so you won't see my username anywhere on an entire thread.
When I see things I disagree with, I'll usually throw in a comment. And with this being HN, where the government is the font of all evil, history started in 1991, everyone is a Constitutional scholar, and the Internet is a magical and special domain where government ought not act, I'm often the only one to disagree on threads like this. Which is fine, c'est la vie.
However normally the points I argue against are not quite so estranged from logic as the idea that an NSA algorithm with focus on a particular 7 words to automatically send SWAT teams to a residence, if only because people usually understand that there are only a finite number of SWAT teams, if nothing else.
So to be clear, I'm not suggesting anything is a justification for sending a SWAT team on 7 words. I'm suggesting that the idea is so patently ludicrous that even the biggest foes of the NSA here have to admit that it's silly to suggest of the NSA that they would send SWAT teams based only and entirely on pattern-matching keywords. So ludicrous, in fact, that it's not even happening, "stupid" analysts or not.
You don't need to be a statistician to figure out that things like satire exist, or research papers written about terrorism, or that there are military personnel looking through "open source intelligence" on extremists to find the edge that will keep them alive through their next deployment. Analysts probably have at least enough training to not burn their intelligence sources on dispatching a SWAT team to a grad student working on a master's thesis, otherwise it would be happening all the time thanks to /b/.
Oh you're satirising an apologist. Fair enough, my bad. Satire gets, well sad when it's indistinguishable from the thing its satirizing (1). Nothing is too silly for the apologists who always showu up.
Rather like Tom Stoppard retiring when the Nobel Peace prize was awarded to Kissinger - how can you top that for satire? Do your worst.
Of course it's ludicrous to suggest that a swat team would be sent, it's that it actually was.
What would be so bad you wouldn't be able to make excuses for it, not that, apparently.
