Blanket surveillance [of the kind the NSA has routinely engaged in] is highly unlikely to prevent a terrorist attack and is a dangerous misuse of resources that, if used in other ways, possibly could prevent attacks (such as the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing). Anyone with a reasonable sense of large numbers could surmise a similar conclusion. When the goal is to identify a very small number of key signals in a large ocean of noise, indiscriminately increasing the size of the ocean is self-evidently not the way to go. I reach my conclusion having spent five years looking at this problem in depth. From early 2002 until the middle of 2006, I worked on a Defense Department research project called NIMD (Novel Intelligence from Massive Data).
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