14 DAY TRIAL // The United States Department of Homeland Security has been spying on people for quite some time now. I agree that's not news to you, but what you didn't know is that they are now taking down the tool they used to mine data.
I'm talking about the "Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement" program, that is also known as ADVISE. They didn't take it down because it was inefficient at gathering the necessary amount of data, but because of what has been found out about it. They were not using bogus info to test their program, they were rather using real data, thus intruding in innocent people's life. This is not the first and I doubt it will be the last time a certain gov-t squashes individuals' privacy in order to act against terrorism.
So, here are the problems when talking about upholding security and using such programs: one thing is that defense is something needed and in order to do things right, you need to prevent stuff from happening. And how do you do that? You intercept criminal communication. But how do you know who the criminals are? Well, that's the issue - you don't! That's why they need to spy on everyone - to find out who the terrorists really are. I don't know exactly how efficient this is, but being done at such a large scale I think it's bound to generate some false positives.
Is this a good security measure or is it too intrusive? I don't know. But the DHS has ditched ADVISE for now and it's not expected to be restarted. In any case, I seriously doubt that they are going to stop spying. Perhaps in the future they will not be so "rude" as to intrude like that, or perhaps they will keep secrets better...