Imagine you work at the NSA. Your boss comes through the door and says, "Hey, we just got approval to store the communications of everyone everywhere. We need the be able to cite credible suspicion before we can look at Americans' communications, though. What can you do for me?"
"Wait, we can intercept and store all the communications?"
"Yep, all of them."
"Because they might include ones that present a threat?"
"Yeah, that's it."
"OK. Well, what if we could narrow it down? What if we implemented a system to only scrutinize communications we thought were likely to be threats. That would be better, right?"
"Where are you going with this?"
"Well, we're already collecting everything, right? What if we went just a teensy bit further? What if we just added a step where we did semantic analysis of everything we collect? That way, we'd narrow down the stuff we were actually, you know, looking at to stuff we were already pretty sure was important."
"That's a GREAT idea!"
"Wait, I'm not finished. We could narrow it down even more if we maintained a graph of communications between everyone we know about. We want to affect the minimum number of people possible, right?"
"Well, we're worried about lone wolves too..."
"That's fine. We can get business records through the PATRIOT Act. We can make this a really fine-grained test. We can look for suspicious purchase patterns, medical conditions, attempts to avoid detection, you name it. What could possibly go wrong?"
"Wait, we can intercept and store all the communications?"
"Yep, all of them."
"Because they might include ones that present a threat?"
"Yeah, that's it."
"OK. Well, what if we could narrow it down? What if we implemented a system to only scrutinize communications we thought were likely to be threats. That would be better, right?"
"Where are you going with this?"
"Well, we're already collecting everything, right? What if we went just a teensy bit further? What if we just added a step where we did semantic analysis of everything we collect? That way, we'd narrow down the stuff we were actually, you know, looking at to stuff we were already pretty sure was important."
"That's a GREAT idea!"
"Wait, I'm not finished. We could narrow it down even more if we maintained a graph of communications between everyone we know about. We want to affect the minimum number of people possible, right?"
"Well, we're worried about lone wolves too..."
"That's fine. We can get business records through the PATRIOT Act. We can make this a really fine-grained test. We can look for suspicious purchase patterns, medical conditions, attempts to avoid detection, you name it. What could possibly go wrong?"