New Math - Iraq, Terrorism, al-Qaeda and Computers

An interesting bit of math occurred to me today during a discussion regarding Big Brother, the Orwellian name for a government who watche sand attempts to control actions and even thoughts.

By typing in any or all of the words in my tagline title into a search, or into an email, or into a discussion forum, or even a blog you might trigger a government computer to log it into the memory. But there's a problem with the paranoia regarding this. While I won't suggest that they're aren't such computers; there are, and they should be there. What I do suggest is that a simple search of this nature will likely not land you in Room 101.

Let me explain.

No, wait, there is too much. Let me sum up.

Worldwide there are over 1 billion internet users daily. I, personally, will run four or five searches each day, with any number of refinements or sub-searches just to find the information or item I'm looking for (usually jewelry for my wife). For the sake of simplicity, let's say that half the people on the internet are actively searching for something via a Google or similar search (I guess the other half are looking at porn/myspace or blogging).

So 500 million people logging in each day to use it for something other than blasting movies.

From that, let's say that they run, as I do, an average of 4 major searches each day (we'll reject any refinements or subsequent searches for the sake of brevity). That's about 20 billion-with-a-B searches. Now, my searches are generally for topics I'm writing about, or interests that I have. For instance, on Monday, I spent an hour searching for the second edition (I already own the original release) of The Crow graphic novels released by Tundra. I used words like "death", "tundra", "crow" "pain & fear" "irony & dispair", etc. These were parts of the titles of the graphic novels. However, some of these words are likely on so-called "watch lists". That's one out of four of my searches.

But again, for the sake of brevity, let's consider that our 500 million people who are not looking for Jenna Jameson, run their 20 billion daily searches and only hit some of these "watch list" words one time in 100.

One percent of the time, an individual hits one of those words on the watch list.

That's 200 million searches that are now logged away by some vast government computer.

Daily.

Now then, we have 200 million searches that may or may not have anything to do with terrorism, national security or, alternately, pornography (bang, explosion, and penetration being part of favorite search/site names all over).

Further consider, now, a computer program can probably sort through the majority of these and discard, let's say, 90 percent of the more mundane. Leaving a mere 20 million user searches.

Daily.

I'm not going to go into inter-agency or multi-national information sharing and whatnot to complicate things. Suffice to say say that we have 20 million daily searches that would like have to be gone through by a dedicated staff. Of our figure of 20 million, we could probably again say that 90 percent could be rejected out of hand, at a first glance, leaving a mere 2 million user searches that might need some follow up work done.

Now the FBI employs about 30,000 men and women, half of which are support personnel. If all 15,000 of these individuals were given the task of reviewing the 2 million user searches each day that required follow up, that would mean each employee of the FBI would have to review 133 searches each and every day.

Including weekends, and we know the government pays overtime.

Our poor FBI folk would have to review one search roughly every four minutes to get through their assigned 133. That means that the other 15,000 field agents, the ones who get to carry guns, would have absolutely no support, backup, paper-pushing, lab or forensic, or the guys ordering bullets for their guns being done while they're trying to do theirs.

It's one thing to pull a gun, it's another to fire and remember that the bullet order didn't quite get through because of all those pesky emails that Agent Clarice Starling is sorting back at HQ.

And that's without the fava beans and a nice chianti.

Now, I'm not saying that they, the various world governments, don't have computers looking for specific words and phrases. They do. They should. Terrorists and the like are bad people.

But something as mundane as looking up "terrorist explosions in Iraq related to al-Qaeda" will probably not trigger a red flag on your personal J. Edgar Hoover file. It would require daily and repeated searches along the same lines as a terrorist seaking a target, a means and/or like-minded individuals in order for you to start showing up in a database. Even then, the federal government generally frowns on tracking you without a warrant.

Goerge Orwell may be alive and well in 2006, but he has infinately less funding and requires infinately more precise techniques than 1984 would suggest. After all, sometimes Big Brother feels the need to go down the street and beat up some of the other kids who claim to be as tough, and spend $250 billion doing it.

And on that note, tell Mom and Dad that I want my $1,000 bucks back!