Edward Snowden may be the last of the human spies
Edward Snowden may be the last of the human spies
In future, the public may never be alerted to NSA-type revelations because surveillance is fast becoming automated
Christopher Steiner
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 29 June 2013 12.00 BST
Edward Snowden and the teams of analysts at the NSA, CIA and GCHQ who sit in front of our stores of electronic intelligence will hardly be necessary in 15 years.' Photograph: Colin Anderson/Getty
Kurt Vonnegut once opined: "Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power." That power corrupts is hardly debatable. For that reason, the evolution of espionage has run in parallel with the development of organised tribes of human beings that we now refer to as countries.
Human nature makes it predictable that organisations such as the NSA would be cataloguing phone calls and other electronic interactions between humans. But Edward Snowden's revelations also tell us how far electronic snooping has yet to go. While the din of outrage still resonates, we should be thankful that Snowden – a human being – actually exists. In the future, the world may never be alerted to such breaches of privacy because there will be no humans involved in spying at all. Just as algorithms have conquered our stock markets and our musical tastes, so too will they conquer surveillance. Even the most human of tasks, snooping, will become the province of the bots.
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Algorithms are more efficient than people; they can find relationships within data streams that a human eye couldn't spot in 20 years; they're indefatigable – and they're cheap. Also on the positive side, algorithms aren't much for drama, counter-espionage or leaking. They do their jobs and don't ask questions. But they can make mistakes that border on inexplicable. Just as an algorithm belonging to Knight Capital in 2012 went berserk and lost that firm $440m (£288m) in 45 minutes, an NSA algorithm could finger thousands of innocent people to be targeted for extra surveillance, or worse.
But these things can and do work in what would seem to be incongruous arenas. The CIA has been using algorithms that run on a thread of mathematics called game theory for more than two decades. The man behind these strings of reason and mathematics, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, a political science professor at New York University, says that analyses driven strictly by human observation are flawed by their very nature. Human analysts, he points out, have appetites for meaningless information such as personal gossip, backstories and tales of failure and conquest. Algorithms couldn't care less about these things, of course – a fact that helps them do their job better than humans. A CIA study found that Bueno de Mesquita's algorithms were right twice as often as its own analysts in making predictions about future intelligence events. The study spanned more than 1,700 predictions made by the algorithms – a task the bots dutifully performed without billing even one hour of overtime.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/29/edward-snowden-last-human-spies
Remember this the day they start the comedy that they're downsizing.
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