Cathy O'Neil Quotes
The NSA buys data from private companies, so the private companies are the source of all this stuff.
O'Neil, Cathy. "The Formula for Injustice: Cathy O'Neil on the Dangers of Big Data." Interview by David Kupfer. The Sun, The Sun Publishing Company, Aug. 2018.
The National Security Agency under George W. Bush was secretly intercepting the phone calls of American citizens in the United States which was technically against the law. The newspapers had broken the story and the comedians had a field day.
The reason this quotation is famous is that Clapper answered “No, Sir”. 3 months later Edward Snowden disclosed the fact that the NSA was collecting some information from EVERY telephone call and e-mail made or sent in the United States. The colloquy became famous when the government tried to capture Snowden and try him for illegally revealing classified information when others saw him as a whistle blower who had told the truth and the guys who lied to Congress and the American people wanted to prosecute him.
Snowden, was a contract worker for Booz Allan assigned to the National Security Agency (NSA). He felt that some of the NSA activities were illegal and unethical and tried to complain to NSA officials who rebuffed him. Despite the fact that he had signed an agreement not to do so, he copied many critical, classified documents that exposed much of the NSA activities that the NSA officials had denied existed—including lying under oath to the Senate. He then made many of them public, violating his oath, breaking the law, and opening up an entire area of government spying which most Americans knew nothing about and about which senior government officials had lied under oath to Congress. They of course wanted to prosecute Snowden who had told the truth, while they had lied. For many Americans, this became a moral and ethical conundrum.
to enhance its ability to conduct surveillance
The Great Firewall of China is the digital control system whereby the Chinese government can block the Chinese public from seeing web sites that are considered dangerous. Generally, these either involve pornography of political viewpoints unacceptable to the government.
Critics of NSA observe that there is a fundamental difference between government invasion of privacy and that of corporations in that the Government can deprive a citizen of his/her liberty or even life while corporations can just invade their privacy, embarrass them, or hurt their economic status. Counter-critics rejoinder is that 99 percent of all the specific abuses of privacy and damages to citizens in the U. S. from massive data collection are made by private corporations, not the NSA or other government agencies.
Catherine ("Cathy") Helen O'Neil is an American mathematician, data scientist, and author. She is the founder of the blog mathbabe.org and has written books on data science, including the New York Times best-seller Weapons of Math Destruction. Her opinion columns are published in Bloomberg View. She is a former Director of the Lede Program in Data Practices at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism's Tow Center.
