Yeah, I obviously clicked on the link, since that’s where I quoted the correct information from. Do you think people should have to click through links in order to get non-misleading information? I assume you’re supportive of licenses, terms and conditions, fine print, and EULAs that you can only see by clicking through to secondary pages. Don’t like those? Well, welcome to the internet! Hey, maybe someone should tell the WSJ that, so they can write misleading articles and hide the facts behind links—I’m sure you could also get behind that.
So if the EFF said that 17,000 people are pulled over in traffic stops every day, would you assume that it’s the same 17,000 people being pulled over every day? After all, they didn’t say it’s 17,000 new people being pulled over every day. Or if they said that the FBI wiretaps 17,000 people every day, you would assume it has been the exact same people every single day? Would you assume that, in the history of FBI wiretaps, only 17,000 people have ever been targeted?
And do you realize that there’s a lot of grey area between “17,000 numbers queried every day” and “17,000 new numbers queried every day”? Like, maybe there’s considerable overlap in day-to-day surveillance/monitoring/querying, but also a significant number of queries that are terminated and new queries initiated? I mean, given the context of surveillance, I think this is the natural interpretation of how things work, in which case the reader would not expect to ever see “17,000 new numbers queried every day.”
So the WSJ’s 0.000054% claim is a cold, hard figure now? How does this cold, hard figure compare to the FISC’s cold, hard figure of 17,000? Seriously; they’re apparently both cold, hard figures, so just how wrong is the WSJ? What is the correct figure that he should have used? Just what percentage of call records are being examined by analysts?
