Thomas Drake
speaker
874 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 11 Sep
Thomas Drake’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Here you're getting vast amounts of data, and the problem was what they call the haystack.
How do you find the needle in the haystack?
The choice, instead of using the best of American ingenuity and inventiveness, and I became well aware of that technology, I was even part of further developing it and being Fourth Amendment FISA compliant, by the way, but all rejected by NSA.
They didn't want any restrictions, any inhibitions.
So what was I saying?
Sorry.
I just lost my train of thought on that.
Well, see, that became the problem.
Well, AI, it's actually made the problem in some ways worse and easier, right?
Because now AI is being touted as the answer, to skip ahead a few years, as the answer to the what does it all mean problem, right?
We have all this data.
How do we make sense of it?
What I was finding is that analysts, and here again, I'm putting my old analyst hat, but here I am as a senior executive and I'm going around NSA's campus and they're getting incredibly frustrated because they're searching across vast amounts of data and it's taking extremely long amounts of time because of the way they had set it up, okay?
It's just haystacks of data, and now you're asking an analyst to go find the needle in that haystack.
The bigger the haystack, the harder it is to find the needle.
But here's the kicker, and this was really the central problem that NSA faced, and they knew this.
They actually knew this as their challenge problem in the 90s.
There was actually studies that said yes, but that meant NSA was gonna have to change its approach.
Analog era, post-World War II, 50s, 60s, 70s technology, even early 80s, you know, you could get a lot of information from a much smaller set of sources because they were largely analog-based systems and they were basically what they called hard targets.
These are targets that you were most interested in.
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