Buried Under A Mountain Of Information

Our government's repeated efforts to accumulate information about us results in us being less secure rather than more. This article ("The backfiring of the surveillance state") is from Salon.com, and author Glenn Greenwald gives two main reasons why this is true:

(1) eliminating strict content limits on what can be surveilled (along with enforcement safeguards, such as judicial warrants) means that government agents spend substantial time scrutinizing and sorting through communications and other information that have nothing to do with terrorism; and (2) increasing the quantity of what is collected makes it more difficult to find information relevant to actual terrorism plots

The article provides a number of examples of how information overload is making us less secure. One of the major ones is the Christmas Day attempted bombing of the airliner in Detroit. As more and more information is revealed as to what the government knew about the bomber before the near disaster, it's clear that more than enough information was there to keep him off American planes. What the President has described as a "failure to connect the dots" is a direct result of information overload. Our intelligence agencies had lots of valid information about the plot and bomber, but they couldn't see the "trees for the forest," to torture an aphorism.

So the next time someone tries to frame the debate over government surveillance powers as one of "security v. privacy and civil liberties" you might suggest that increasing the government's surveillance abilities will make us less, not more, safe. Glenn Greenwald quotes former FBI agent and 9/11 whistleblower Coleen Rowley:

Extraneous, irrelevant data clutter the system, making it even harder for analysts to make meaningful future connections. A needle is hard enough to find in the proverbial haystack, without adding still more hay. . . . Quantity cannot substitute for quality.