At 12:27 PM 12/31/2002 -0800, Michael Cardenas wrote:
On Tue, Dec 31, 2002 at 12:12:02PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
> On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 11:32 AM, Michael Cardenas wrote:
> As for your point about prescription drugs, box cutters, kitchen knives
> being trackable, I assume this is a troll or something you haven't
> thought through. Treat it as a signal to noise problem, with millions
> of such purchases every day. Again, I don't have time to describe this
> in detail. Think about it.
Isn't the whole purpose of TIA (or the claimed purpose) to be able to
say person A bought weapon B on this day, bought C gallons of gas to
drive to govt building D, and then blew up building D with weapon B,
therefore person A must be the criminal?
The scalability of the problem is much different depending on your goals.
If you want to sort through the transcriptions of people who
bought drugs and knives and airline tickets but no luggage
in an effort to find potential terrorists, that's useless.
But if you've already got a suspect, like a Green Party member
who wrote an annoyed letter to the President and threatened to
tell her Congresscritter in person what a bad President he is,
and you're trying to find suspicious-sounding evidence,
then government access to tracking data can make it possible for you
to find out that she bought some toenail scissors before her trip,
and bought unspecified "merchandise" at a garden store,
and bought far more gasoline for her SUV than she'd need to
drive it to the airport and back, and bought some new shoes,
then obviously she's a planning to hijack a plane and
go shoe-bomb the President with ANFO so it's ok to bring her in
and force her to rat out her co-conspirators.
But it's much more realistic to use all that data to
send her an L.L.Bean catalog and the web page for Burpee's,
maybe even including the hidden link for hydroponic gardening
and plant-cloning supplies....
