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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."
As a non-US citizen, I'm slightly happy to see that someone cares about keeping tabs on US activities. Especially military activities.
Contrary to popular belief most (or at least a lot) of what the NSA does isn't all that secret. They're mostly just concerned with improving I.T. security in general, both for the gub'mint and private corporations. The do research. They publish papers. The typical boring CompSci stuff. This mailing list was probably a bunch of people involved in this sort of low-level work.
The secret stuff is done by Central Security Services and the Information Assurance Directorate. They're the guys that "certify" trusted networks and systems. They basically do for networks what the FBI does for people when they investigate them for clearance. Of course, as part of their job, they "audit" the security of our critical systems remotely and covertly (i.e. Red Teaming).
The really secret stuff is done by the SIGINT folks. They're tasked with intercepting and analyzing any "interesting" communications while at the same time keeping our communications secure. They're the codemakers and the codebreakers. Even in this über-secretive area, they're pretty much just a bunch of crypto-geeks who never get their hands dirty (they leave HUMINT to the CIA).
Heck, the only guys at NSA HQ who even carry guns are the security guards. Well.. them and the several thousand soldiers surrounding them (they are in the middle of an Army base after all).
That all having been said, whoever "harvested" this information is asking for trouble. They can expect a visit from some counter-intelligence officers who will want to know exactly why these persons are so interested in who's on the NSA's payroll.
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Yes, that's the joke. It's dismally common among north american* english speakers to [hear|read] "Australia" when someone [says|writes] "Austria", mostly because they've never heard of Austria. My father is from Austria and has a shirt he got there that has:
-An outline of Austria
-A kangaroo silhouette inside the outline
-A "red circle with diagonal line through it" over the kangaroo
-A caption which reads "There are no kangaroos in AUSTRIA"
*The English are close enough to europe to know where Austria is, and Australians know the name of their own country well enough to tell the difference; but like 20% of US and Canadian english speakers he meets get it wrong, according to my dad.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I don't think "most" Austrians is true. Austrians in general are quite proud of Arnold and what he's accomplished. Never mind the bodybuilding or the occasional alienating statement.