waterplace

do you feel there is a rationale for NSA in leveraging 'dragnet' surveillance to detect and identify threats, versus restricting their capabilities to monitoring known threats? to what extent would their detection capabilities be blunted if what you are advocating comes to pass, and what would the impact of that blunting be?

Paul, what will your team do to avoid creating dependency? For example, are your beneficiaries being trained in financial literacy, savings, and how to invest those dollars in increasing their household livelihoods? What will those families do when your funds go away?

Creating a culture of dependency could do significant harm, unless at the same time you are helping the community become more self-sufficient, resilient, and sustainable.

Thanks Paul for your response. As a development professional, I don't think I have the same read of the study you linked.

From your linked (small & preliminary) study, "find no systematic evidence that cash transfer programs discourage work." This is different than fostering a culture of dependency, or helping train families to know how to responsibly use their income and leverage it towards resilient and sustainable growth. Families will continue to work, because they have to, even with cash payments of some kind -- they're just that poor.

But what I'm talking about is their journey out of poverty, and not establishing a culture of dependency that can contribute to families staying poor. One of the biggest challenges we face is that impoverished families lack knowledge: how to do agriculture sustainably, what inputs to use, how to manage soil and water, what crops to plant & when, how to get the best prices at market, how to be financially literate & how to use savings. I can't disagree more with your opinion that training has a bad track record or lacks evidence-based results. You can look up almost any study on capacity building and it's the same principle.

In short, having done this for a long time and helping create and manage dozens of multi-million projects with hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries -- the approach you're suggesting is missing some key links. But, as you say, it'll be a great way to test, and testing is important.

what alternatives would you suggest, for the NSA maintaining effective cyber capabilities in detecting and mitigating threats to the safety of citizens of the United States and other countries?