There's a Global Intelligence Forum set to begin tomorrow in Ireland, and former FBI head Louis Freeh threw out some teasers in an AP interview published at Globalintelligenceforum.com.
The news that the NSA is roping in all of our web searches and email conversations probably caused most internet users to feel very vulnerable to the government and the political operatives therein. But what's also annoying to many citizens is that the program probably wasn't really intended to stop a terrorist attack from happening but to assist in apprehending the perpetrators after the fact, just like surveillance cameras. Freeh seems to see this as a problem, too. From the interview:
But he said, conversely, everyone in the 21st century should assume that every time we click our keyboard, or thumb our smart phone, it's being put blindly into multiple databases ranging from internet aggregators to NSA hard drives.
For law enforcement officials, he said, the challenge was whether this tsunami of information could be mined effectively before an attack. While he described U.S. collection of data as "very robust," its analysis and use in detecting crimes was not.
As one might expect, Freeh sides with the government on the collection of the data, only that too many people have access to it as well as to other sensitive information. His solution?
He suggested that a group's most confidential information might have to be left without an electronic fingerprint at all and be kept, old school, like the Coca-Cola company's recipe for its soft drinks once was under lock and key in a safe.
Boy, that is old school. Meanwhile, our high tech power grid, the most important component of our sources of sustenance, is just sitting there waiting for a Stuxnet type virus to get the signal to do it's thing and put us back into another dark age.
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