I’m not really trying to get involved in that discussion. My point was just in reply to the following:
“I can’t think of a morally legitimate reason for creating a surveillance state.”
The grants involved are often for more basic science questions that have broad applicability. For example NSA is interested in analysis the meta data it has to predict who may be funneling funds to a terrorist cell; the type of statistical learning tools it needs can for example be used for data mining genomic data.
