More Details of the NSA's Social Network Analysis

mrogers writes "USA Today has a story describing how the NSA looks for suspicious calling patterns in the huge volumes of traffic data it collects. "Templates" such as a call from overseas followed by a flurry of domestic calls are used to identify leads, which are forwarded to the FBI for investigation. There have been complaints that low-quality leads are drawing agents away from other cases, and similar pattern-matching approaches have been found wanting in the past. Can data mining identify terrorists?"

Comments

My grandmother may be a terrrorist.

[JesseL]

She's always getting calls from various places and then making a flurry of more local calls. She uses code phrases like "your cousin's baby was born last night and it's a boy", or "Great Aunt Zelda had a stroke but they say she's going to be okay".

Re:terrororists

[Billosaur]

I don't know about terrorists, but calling patterns can effectively be used to identify drug dealers, according to HBO's The Wire. I imagine polygamists, as illustrated in HBO's Big Love, would exhibit abnormal calling patterns with their supersized family calling plans.

And let's not forget all those out there with girlfriends/boyfriends they don't want their wives/husbands to find out about. That alone could make great extortion material and provide a new way to fund covert operations.