UK Intelligence Boss: We Had All This Info And Totally Failed To Prevent Charlie Hebdo Attack... So Give Us More Info

by Mike Masnick
Techdirt
Jan. 12, 2015

We already wrote about surveillance state opportunists like Michael Hayden using the Charlie Hebdo attacks as evidence for why the surveillance state should be allowed to spy on everyone, and now the head of the UK's MI5 intelligence agency has similarly used the attack as an excuse to demand more surveillance powers:

The head of MI5, Andrew Parker, has called for new powers to help fight Islamist extremism, warning of a dangerous imbalance between increasing numbers of terrorist plots against the UK and a drop in the capabilities of intelligence services to snoop on communications....

[....]

"If we are to do our job, MI5 will continue to need to be able to penetrate their communications as we have always done. That means having the right tools, legal powers and the assistance of companies which hold relevant data. Currently, this picture is patchy."

What's especially sickening about this is that this argument "works" for surveillance state opportunists whether they succeed or fail. If they actually do stop terrorist threats (and in the same speech Parker claims they have stopped a few planned attacks in "recent months" but fails to provide any details), they use that to claim that the surveillance works and they need to do more. Yet when they fail to stop an attack -- as in the Charlie Hebdo case -- they don't say it's because the surveillance failed, instead, it's because they didn't have enough data or enough powers to collect more data. In other words, succeed or fail, the argument is always the same: give us more access to more private data.

And they'll claim this again and again, even as it's been shown over and over again that grabbing more garbage data actually makes it that much more difficult to find relevant data. Piling more hay onto the haystack doesn't make the needles easier to find. It makes them much harder to find and often sends you digging through piles of hay for a needle you think you saw, but isn't really there. Yet that never seems to enter the equation. It's as if those in the surveillance business don't understand the idea of quantity over quality.

And this goes beyond just the general desire for "more" power, to a ridiculous belief among some in the power of algorithms to sort through this data. The power of "big data" can be useful in many ways, but people get so obsessed with the magic of algorithms and the power in "big data" that they forget that these things are imperfect, and the ability to sort through massive piles of data for relevant information and links is incredibly limited and faulty. Yet, because a computer does it, they get all excited and think it's all powerful. It's this mistaken belief in the power of the algorithms that leads them to always assume that "more data is better" and the end result, unfortunately, is continuously stripping away privacy, in search of some tiny marginal benefit that may not even exist.