Simple equation:
A national security system that is mostly bloat and mission creep instead of real, honest to goodness, security
+
Badly design social media monitoring tools that are sifting through billions of messages a day?
=
FAILURE
Here's a simple example. A young British guy makes a tweet to his friends:
Easy to discern the tweet is about hard drinking/partying.
He flies to Los Angeles with a friend. He is promptly arrested. Held in cuffs/cell for 12 hours and deported.
Why? The Department of Homeland Security flagged his tweet as a possible threat to the US.
Huh?
Automated security at its finest.
Add lethal drones that kill people due to “terrorist” signature behaviors and we have a problem Houston.
Phi Beta Iota: Oddly enough, this is the exact unclassified parallel of the National Security Agency (NSA) that processes less than 1% of all traffic, and less than 5% of “high priority” traffic, according to various open source reports. At what point–in the midst of economic collapse–do serious people get to say “enough – let's get real about needs, capabilities, costs, outputs, and trade-offs?” Has anyone been able to find the “M” in OMB? This is what you get when “management” is non-existent, money is printed without pause, and very expensive executive merely channel dollars rather than actually thinking about what they buy, what the produce, and how we might better spend (or not spend at all) those dollars.
