A hop, skip, and a leap of faith?

July 26th, 2013 by Charles Cameron

[ by Charles Cameron — Joyner estimates 2.5 million, Zeynep proposed 27 million, NSA knows — but sealed lips, eh? ]

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10 year old Lilly Allen was told by UK police recently that "playing hopscotch in front of her house could lead to criminal charges for drawing on the sidewalk" -- oops.

When you’re playing the kid’s game of hopscotch, three hops doesn’t get you very far. But Three hops create a data deluge is Zeynep Tufekci‘s short-form analysis of the adult version of the game as practiced by NSA, and it’s interesting to see how far three hops will take you.

Here are two estimates, from two very bright people:

Someone should really find out from an appropriate someone else what the grand total of US citizens swept up under first, second and third hops, skips and exponential leaps has been over the last couple of years.

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Sources:

  • Little Girl Warned

  • James Joyner

  • Zeynep Tufekci

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    1. Charles Cameron:

      July 27th, 2013 at 3:40 am

      This post drew an interesting twitter conversation, with Valdis Krebs joining in.  He now has three posts up in which he applies his mastery of social networking to the topic of NSA data-sweeps to good effect:

      Connecting the Dots
      Vacuuming the Internet, and
      Contact Chaining

      He tells me he’ll have a new post on the topic sometime this weekend — so keep your eye on The Network Thinkers blog.