Techlines Today

Is Too Much Information Really a Bad Thing?

By Adam Myers ⋅ June 18, 2008 ⋅ Tags: government spying, information is power, your rights

An article on the Guardian website asks whether collecting too much information on innocent people makes it harder to catch the guilty.

At a certain point, data gathered to predict the weather overwhelms your capacity to add it to your

calculations efficiently, resulting in ever-longer runtimes that give less accurate predictions. It’s better to crunch the data needed to calculate tomorrow’s weather in 10 minutes (and refine your guess twice an hour) than to shovel so much data into the hopper that you don’t get tomorrow’s forecast until next week.

The sweet spot lies somewhere between gathering too much information and gathering too little – and the secret to hitting that spot is intelligent, discriminating data-acquisition.

Take London: cover every square inch of the city with CCTVs and you’ll get so much information that you’ll never make any sense of it. Scotland Yard says that CCTVs help solve fewer than 3% of all crimes, while a study in San Francisco found that at best, criminals simply move out of camera range, while at worst they assume no one is watching.

Similarly, if you take fingerprints from every person who applies for a visa – or worse still, from every person in Britain who has to carry one of the proposed new biometric cards – you will fill the databases with chaff that slows down searches, generates endless false matches, and threatens everyone in the database with the worst kind of identity theft.

Look, I’m against this over-surveillance of the government as much as the next guy, but I don’t think Cory Doctrow’s argument is very good. To me, most of the talking points revolve around two key points:

1. All the extraneous information makes it harder and slower to process in order to uncover the desired results.
2. Becoming overwhelmed with information leads to more false accusations or findings.

Point 1 can be countered with the old adage “throw more hardware at it!” This is a solvable problem assuming there is room in the surveillance budget for technical equipment in the backend.

Point 2 is also a technical problem. Falsehoods can be reduced by properly structuring your search queries or parse routines. While not a trivial problem, time can be spent to improve the efficiency of this process - given great speed and storage of course.

The concern here is that both of these points accentuate the point that existing surveillance is not “good enough”, therefore it should be junked. That’s fine to have that argument, but what then if those issues are addressed? Is it suddenly justifiable? I suspect many would still have issues.

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