Re: asymmetric snooping

Posted by Steve Smith on Sep 25, 2013; 12:05am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/asymmetric-snooping-tp7583857p7583879.html

Marcus -

I still maintain that within one component (to whatever degree one can actually identify a single component that isn't subdivided into yet more refined components) the quality is somewhat continuous and often relative rather than absolute?  

In which case I roll out IEEE 754.   Bits will do the job!

I don't doubt that bits *can* do the job (given that you HAVE enough and know *how much is enough*), but there still remains the question (in my mind anyway) of whether *thinking about* a system as discrete vs continuous is useful.  I would claim that IEEE754 (formal specification of floating point numbers in digital systems) exists for precisely this reason.  While many (all?) things *can* be modeled using discretized continuua, we still maintain the Real numbers as an abstraction for a reason... and not because they work better in digital computers.

There is, however, a grey continuum it seems in practice. 

Replace the `reasons' in my hypothetical composite channel with `legal arguments' and we can go anywhere. 

That is one of the things I don't trust about the implementation (and possibly conception) of our legal system... it does discretize and make reductionistic something which *I* claim is not (should not be?), human experience and interaction.

http://www.justice.gov/opa/documents/memoforeignsurveillanceact09252001.pdf

I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time (that last page).  No, I don't buy that it's a feature that it is grey.  It's just scary. 

It is definitely scary!  And yes, like many things, I too am sure "it seemed like a good idea at the time". 

If my logic tracks yours here, offering up "a purpose of a FISA search is to collect foreign intelligence" vs "the purpose..." gives the searcher pretty much carte blanche...  when the NSA opens up your "thank you note" to your "Aunt Tilde in Des Moines" and reads it and runs it through some LSA algorithms and decides that the cadence of your text suggests a "high likelihood that one or both of the correspondents suffer from paranoid, delusional, schizophrenia", that the original argument of "it might have been a coded message between foreign spies! you never know!" is sufficient cause for the opening and the LSA, etc.".

We may be arguing different points, however:

I thought we were talking about the value and appropriateness of "transparency" in society, the relative value (to whom?) of asymmetric transparency (like my one-way glass in automobiles on public roadways?).  The question of what can and should be (and what inevitably will be?) private or public in any (especially an Open) society.

- Steve



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