Edward Snowden’s revelations about the scope of government surveillance made me think about how we can quantify privacy between each other and our government. Here statistical economics can provide the framework needed to do so, through the use of measuring the index of probability of human action, and specifying that government knowledge of an individual cannot be less than some minimum index, without the use of a warrant to obtain specific information delineated in the warrant. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Snowden
NSA Monitoring: The Beat Cop Pandemic
In all that is the “Meh” of the revelations of the extent of NSA monitoring domestic communications, here is an analogy to help better understand what it is that we are dismissing.
The NSA is not engaging in direct action, where active monitoring and interception of communications is done. Whew! But what is it that they are doing? Our understanding of the space that is cyber space is giving society a bit of a conceptual block. To resolve this understanding of the problem we will use analogy. We are going to transform cyberspace into the real world of three dimensions. Here, the geeks running the NSA data centers are the beat cops, the sort we see driving around town. Continue reading
Statistical Economics 