too much information

Went duckin' and dodgin' through downtown Seattle traffic today and somehow got to Virginia Mason Hospital, where I'm now in the waiting room for an appointment with the physical therapist. Like a lot of other things, downtown Seattle is doable if you plan for it. But don't plan too much -- you might outsmart yourself.

It's been another week of dealing with businesses and agencies who either couldn't get my change of address straight, or thought I hadn't paid a bill that I took care of a month ago. This difficult process used to be easy, back in the days when we all wrote checks and mailed 'em in. There was always a space on the back of the bill where you'd write in your new address and that was that -- somebody at the electric company or the phone company or the magazine wrote down the new address on your file card and life went on. Then came the cyber age, and...well, you know the tune as well as I do, I'm sure. Everything that used to be simple is now immensely complicated.

It seems to me that our present-day mania and obsession with total control has paradoxically led to its opposite -- a loss of control. Formerly simple processes, which were vulnerable to the occasional clerical error, have been overlain with layers of complexity intended to make them fail safe, and loaded with automatic, "system-generated" responses which are frequently confusing or wrong.

But that's progress.

Glenn Greenwald's Salon column today addresses this same phenomenon and its disastrous effect on the nation's security and intelligence services, as evidenced by the Christmas Day Underpants of Mass Destruction fiasco.

Greenwald writes: As numerous experts...have attempted, with futility, to explain, expanding the scope of raw intelligence data collected by our national security agencies invariably impedes rather than bolsters efforts to detect terrorist plots...for two reasons: (1) eliminating strict content limits on what can be surveilled (along with enforcement safeguards, such as judicial warrants) means that government agents spend substantial time scrutinizing and sorting through communications and other information that have nothing to do with terrorism; and (2) increasing the quantity of what is collected makes it more difficult to find information relevant to actual terrorism plots.

The whole column is worth a read, since it deals not just with the issue of too much information, but also with the fact that much of this irrelevant, useless, and in-the-way information is illegally gathered for no good reason. The scareder we get, the more we violate the rights of our own citizens while tying ourselves in panic-stricken knots.

Bogged down in the minutiae of intercepted phone calls and yards-long watch lists, our swollen security forces, whose various and sundry agencies either can't or won't communicate with each other, missed the Nigerian kid whose own father had tried to warn them about him, and left him a gap in the system a pregnant rhinoceros could have run through.

This is where mass mania and social obsession of any kind leads, to a society that can't get out of its own way.