Mass spying means more errors

Jennifer Granick has been reinforcing the message of real security experts that mass surveillance leads to massive numbers of errors.

"If there aren't enough agents or translators to review all the false positives that random surveillance produces now, even before adding mass surveillance of U.S.-based communications to the mix, there's no reason to believe Judge Richard A. Posner's recent assertion that data mining from the innocent will enable detection of a terrorist plot collected from scattered, tiny bits of information.

Mass surveillance isn't just illegal, it's probably a bad idea. We need to ferret out real terrorists, not create a smoke screen of expensive and distracting false positives that they can hide behind. More information doesn't make us smarter. We need smarter information."