Some context here about the 4th-last slide: After all the effort that went into building this sophisticated system, the highest scoring selector it identified that traveled to Peshawar and Lahore is a journalist who works for Al Jazeera:<p><a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/08/u-s-government-designated-prominent-al-jazeera-journalist-al-qaeda-member-put-watch-list/" rel="nofollow">https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/08/u-s-government...</a><p>Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and CIA, once publicly stated: "We kill people based on metadata":<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdQiz0Vavmc" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdQiz0Vavmc</a><p>This seems pretty worrying to me.
Context: <a href="https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/08/u-s-government-designated-prominent-al-jazeera-journalist-al-qaeda-member-put-watch-list/" rel="nofollow">https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/05/08/u-s-government...</a><p>Pretty scary what kind of confirmation bias is creeping in to the NSA's methods there, and the broader implications. Anyone who has worked with big data knows how easy it is to "discover" all sorts of patterns that are not really there.
Kinda surprising that, at this point, cryptome still doesn't have HTTPS support. With all of the government spying, a little privacy would be nice!
Conclusion: benefits/budget spent is extremely low.
False positives rate is very high and author tries to wiggle multiple times to make it appear less worthless.
So they're automatically generating selectors. Remember that when they try to imply that by using selectors and writing up justifications for their reasonable search/seizures, it's all been automated.
Just a kind reminder to USfg employees and their contractors -- if you have CM on your personal computer, regardless of the source, you're liable as if you stole it.
Top Secret information has been determined to cause exceptionally grave damage to national security if released. Don't read it; don't click on it; don't post links to it. It's not funny; it's not clever; it's not fun.<p>The poster does deserve credit for putting the classification in the link text, so I know not to click on it. Seriously, thank you for that.