Machine Madness and Big Al Gore

7/28/2019 Machine Madness and Big Al Gore

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Machine Madness and Big Al Gore

The problem isnt that someone is going to be looking at your telephone records. They

are, no matter what the President says. They will be because that is the nature of

human curiosity. They wont look at mine because I am not famous or even very

interesting. Most likely, they wont look at any of yours for much the same reasons,though they could if someone working at NSA knows you.

The problem is the machine will be looking at every telephone call you make and every

email address you send something to or receive something from. Likewise, the machine

will take note of every web site you visit, and, if you have a blog or website, it will make

note of every address that visits you.

So what? Good question. The machine is programed to cross check your telephone and

web activity with a set of sophisticated heuristics designed to make assumptions about

your usage and, based upon those assumptions classify you based upon your potentialthreat to the state and the nation. Again, so what? I am not a threat to anybody, you

say. While that is almost certainly true you need to keep in mind that the only thing the

machine knows is what it has been programed to know based upon what it sees when

it analyzes your records.

Many of you are professional writers. From time to time, you are seized by an

uncontrollable urge to pen a novel or short story. Some lucky few of you occasionally

are employed to write an article on a specific subject of interest to a periodicals

publisher or editor. Such an article, or novel or short story, may require you to do a little

research into a topic that may be of concern to our security forces.

Lets say, for the sake of argument, that you are writing a story that involves a nuclear

suitcase bomb. In the old days youd take your self off to the library at Georgia Tech or

MIT or some place where technical literature relating to nuclear weapons in general and

suitcase bombs in particular can be found. Now days, however, youd first hit der google

or da badda bingor the old yahoo. Eventually, given the subject matter, youd end up

using all three, and youd use them a lot.

In the course of your research you may even have occasion to correspond with some

well known nut case who advocates the right of a citizen under the Second Amendment

to keep and bear a suitcase bomb. After all, the amendment does not say you have theright to keep and bear guns, it says arms and a suitcase bomb is an arm, a damn

powerful one. Also,the article may require a little proof that the whole concept sought by

the editor doesnt lack credulity. Every journalist knows, to prove validity you must find

somebody and demonize him. It is even better if you can find a real demon and dont

have to make on up.


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In any event, you are doing nothing other than conducting research in preparation to

exercise your right to freedom of speech, expression and the press. What could be more

American than that? Nothing, unless you did it all the while keeping a loaded AK47 in

your lap (that would be a somewhat better expression of American values). Indeed, this

activity is practically a working definition of mom, baseball and apple pie.

Unfortunately, the machine will not look at the web based pattern and emails to and

from nut jobs as anything so innocent. The machine will not do this because it hasnt

any real opinion about you or your activities. Seeing such a pattern it will flag you as a

potential trouble maker because it has been programed to do so.

You see, the machine and all these terra bits of data and the operating system that runs

it is a giant information system. Its sole purpose is to flag potential bad guys and classify

them.

I dont have any inside information on PRISM. I dont know anybody associated with theNSA or any security organization. I do understand the general outline of information

systems and the enormous power over our everyday lives we have ceded to them. They

all exist to do exactly what PRISM is doing. They are decision support systems

designed to wade through mountains of crap and fine a diamond or two. They do this by

classifying stuff, in PRISMs case, us.

I have no idea what level of responsibility has been assigned to the machine. I do not

know if it is empowered to flag an enemy combatant or a potential terrorist or a

candidate for the no fly list. I do not know if the system is embedded with an artificial

intelligence program that would allow the machine to temporarily place, pending

human review, a name on any or all such lists without human intervention. I doubt

anybody in Congress knows. I doubt the President knows. I suspect General Clapper

doesnt know. Any of these guys will have to ask somebody to tell them who they should

ask to find out. More than likely, whoever they ask will have to ask somebody else. The

guys that could answer questions like that do not hang out in the executive suite.

We all need to know exactly how much power this machine has been given. You know

how big organizations work. It doesnt matter weather if the organization is in the public

sector or the private sector. If the machine flags a name, nobody wants to take the risk

of overruling the machine. What if the machine is right? You override the machine and it

turns out to be right, your career is shot. It aint gonna happen.

What will happen, assuming there is even a mandatory human review of machine

decisions, is the name flagged, maybe your name, will be sent down the chain to be

reviewed by the local FBI office. They will, in all likelihood, have never heard of you.

Theyll have to do a little background research that will involve local authorities (pray you

havent pissed off the local police bitching about break ins in the neighborhood) and


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some of your neighbors. Maybe they run into someone with a grudge against you and

maybe not.

Due to budget constraints, the local FBI cant spend a lot of time on this and they never

get around to talking to you. So, they dont know about the article youre researching

and wont until it is published, if it ever is. They report back saying the matter isinconclusive so you stay on the list the machine put you on.

Now, sweet Jesus, the story your working on leads you to pipe bombs and pressure

cooker bombs and assault rifles and body armor. PRISM picks this new activity up and

cross references it with what they already have. Maybe now, bells and whistles really

begin to chime and blow in a great cacophony. Maybe now, you, already having a

classification and a FBI file, really come into focus to the machine and its masters.

Maybe now, you are really screwed and it fell on you before you even noticed you were

under consideration as a terrorist. What a prize you just won.

So, as a practical matter, the problem is information systems classify people based on

gross summations of activity evaluated by mathematical heuristics you couldnt

understand if the programmer explained it to you. You couldnt understand, not because

youre stupid, but because you dont speak the language nor do you think the way they

think.

Now, the security forces have a file, a rather fat file, and they are invested in your status

as a bad guy. You could spend the rest of your life trying to unravel this mess. Worse,

you may not even know why life has gotten so difficult because every blessed thing

associated with the governments ongoing concern with you is classified. You cant see

it, your lawyer cant see it, warrants can be issued by secret courts you dont know

exists and to which neither you nor your lawyer have access. Hell, youll never even get

notice youre under discussion until the hammer falls. It could be, if, through some

comedy of bureaucratic blunders and intimidation of all sentient humans by the

information systems conclusions about you, you win the security lottery and are

classified an enemy combatant. In that case, the hammer could be a drone that takes

out you neighborhood.

I know this is highly unlikely. However, if we are going to have this inconceivably huge

information system studying some of our activities and making material decisions about

us (or recommendations about us), we need to have a through and complete debateabout what the decisions are, how are they determined, what powers have been

delegated to the information system, what data and activities are the decisions based

upon, what rights of notification and appeal exist and more stuff besides. Lost in the

debate between the liberty/privacy side and the security side is the detail of how this

system operates and what decisions it is empowered to make.


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PRISM could be an okay thing, maybe even a good thing, but it has to be subject to our

democratic processes and the rule of law. If we dont insist on that, no one, not Barrack

Obama, nobody, can truthfully say anything about what this will do to our society. We

are not, as it is currently constituted, ceding massive new powers to the federal

government. We are ceding massive new powers to an information system over which

no human system of politics and law has ultimate control.

HAL (2001-A Space Odyssey) is real and we are being asked to live with it. Like war

being too important to be left to the generals, a massive and ubiquitous and intrusive

information system like PRISM is too important to be left to the programmers and the

system designers and the politicians. None of them understand the human/information

system interface.

I know President Obama wont want to hear this, but he needs to get on the phone with

Al Gore and ask him how to fix this. There may be others who understand the

technology and the politics and the international terrorist threat and and thehuman/technology interface as well as Big Al, but none of them has recently been

interviewed on the subject.

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Machine Madness and Big Al Gore