A worrisome need …

… NSA: THE DECISION PROBLEM | Edge.org. (Hat tip, Lee Lowe.)

This is much bigger than the relative merits of national security vs. the fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, or any of the other debates by which the Snowden revelations have been framed. We are facing a fundamental decision (as Turing anticipated) between whether human intelligence or machine intelligence is given the upper hand. The NSA has defended wholesale data capture and analysis with the argument that the data (and metadata) are not being viewed by people, but by machines, and are therefore, legally, not being read. This alone should be cause for alarm.