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."

Comments

"Through Social Engineering"?

[JLavezzo]

But, your honor, I'm not a Con Artist, I'm a professional Social Engineer!

Re:Obviously...

[JadeNB]

Don't give anybody any ideas.

Good grief

[Otter]

1) The Biometric Consortium is not "part of the NSA"
2) Somebody lied a bit to get onto a relatively open mailing list
3) This whole thing is on par with kids grabbing some telephone switch manuals out of a dumpster and bringing them to a 2600 meeting to show off to other losers.

Re:Good grief

[barnacle]

sorry, this article is a joke. I doubt if you even have to lie to get on the list (http://www.heise.de/newsticker/foren/go.shtml?rea d=1&msg_id=7544912&forum_id=74857).

If you can read German (if not use babelfish) here is a guy replying to the original German article (on heise online) complaining about how stupid the whole story is (he was also on the list as a student):
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/foren/go .shtml?read =1&msg_id=7544912&forum_id=74857

not only was the list basically an open list but the members were notified in advance that the list's contents would be analyzed by Quintessenz and nobody complained.

I think the shocking thing here is to see how far Slashdot will go to sensationalize stupid bullshit to get more advertising hits.

Wrong Story

[Tom]

The story isn't that they got onto the mailing list.

The story is that they have sifted through huge amounts of data to extract the interesting parts, and essentially made an analysis of the history of biometric standards, and the respective attempts of NSA people to push it this way or that.

It's one thing to post "I think the NSA is influencing biometric companies" to /. and it's an entirely different thing to analyse thousands of postings to prove that and how they influence whom and when.