How Not to Spot a Terrorist

Paranoid America--by which I mean its governors--has long dreamed of foolproof technology to guard the Homeland from subversion, or penetration by alien hostiles.

In its latest variant the vaunted technology comes in the form of sweeps by the computers of the National Security Agency, programmed to intercept hundreds of millions of phone, e-mail and fax messages. These days as much as a third of global communications are on fiber-optic cable routes that pass through the United States.

The NSA's programmers claim that the artificial intelligence programs--terabytes of speech, text and image data--monitoring the filters are of such refinement that they can determine the sex, age and class of the communicators and, no doubt (though they take care not to boast of any such profiling), their genetic and linguistic ethnicity too. After all, Middle Easterners are surely a prime target.

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