Slashdot Mirror
Datamining the NSA
elmartinos writes "With official permission from the data protection committee in the Austrian Office of the Federal Chancellor, quintessence (an association for the re-establishment of information civil rights) has data mined an extensive mailing list related to the Biometric Consortium, which is part of the NSA. Heise (Google translation) writes that a quintessenz activist was able to get access to the mailing list through social engineering, and used a PHP script to extract 1GB worth of data. Quintessenz is using the open source tool Weka for data mining, and Kea for text mining. The first chapter of the gathered information is available online."
http://216.239.59.104/search?q=cache:qosbTf6Ca3gJ: www.quintessenz.org/cgi-bin/index%3Fid%3D000100003 172+&hl=en Google cache.. site's down
If anyone can hear me, slap some sense into me But you turn your head, and I end up talking to myself
"The Biometric Consortium's Electronic Discussion Group is for federal, state and local government employees and others in industry and academia interested in biometrics. The Electronic Discussion Group is a free electronic mailing list for sharing discussions about all things biometric, ranging from research questions to meeting announcements.
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Austria's not a member of NATO.
m l
Secondly this mailing list was/is an open list. The magical "hack" here was writing a script to get some historical postings that weren't easily accessed.
Also Quintessenz apparently notified the list that it was going to be analyzed and nobody complained (probably because it's an open list anyway).
This, like many other Slashdot stories lately (or is it just me?) is unbelievably overhyped bullshit.
Or, if prefer another viewpoint, and you too would like to join the ranks of NSA hackers - follow this secret link to the mailing list!
http://www.biometrics.org/html/listserv.ht
(but don't tell anyone I posted this link. I don't have a tinfoil hat... yet)