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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?"
The problem is, this strategy is not only ineffective, it can be counterproductive.
There is plenty out there on the "Strength of weak links", where past associations (old roommates, sleeper cells), with not contact can be very strong service links when reinitiated.
There is also plenty out there on how this is DoSing the FBI.
And the tin foil hat crowd (a very popular piece of headware these days) will point out that this tool is far more useful for targeting individuals than searching for patterns. And what if you are the target?
Test your net with Netalyzr
I guess as the US is a democratic country, it's alright to do so. Democracy means, literally, rule by the people. The vast majority of people either doesn't care or doesn't get beyond posting "wtf, criminals!" on /.
You'd have to shut down TV for a week or only a day - I bet enough people would start to care about this and many other things...
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
Armed with details of billions of telephone calls, the National Security Agency used phone records linked to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to create a template of how phone activity among terrorists looks, say current and former intelligence officials who were briefed about the program. (from the USA Today article)
Are they admitting to collecting details on domestic phone calls _before_ 9/11?
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Not that I'm at all happy about the monitoring, but in fairness, would the NSA/FBI report massive success with the data mining? Doing so would inform terrorists (drug dealers, lesbians, Democrats) that the simple pattern of their phone calls can identify them, forcing them to change their methods of communications, undermining the success of the program. It might be sufficient for them to publicly leak stories that the program isn't working while reporting to the government that it's actually quite successful. It certainly wouldn't be the first time disinformation has been used.
An interesting aside: as reported by Bruce Schneier, al Qaeda members avoid Echelon by using shared Hotmail accounts. Rather than sending email, they create drafts and save them, and have a running conversation in the draft before deleting it. Not sending the email means the email doesn't trigger midpoint monitoring. Would they be doing that if they didn't know about Echelon?
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Bruce Schneier wrote an interesting piece on why data-mining not only doesn't work, but can't work in the context of finding terrorist plots:
t w=wn_story
http://www.wired.com/news/columns/0,70357-0.html?
In a nutshell, his premise is that the underlying assumptions that make data mining work for such things as credit card fraud don't hold when searching for terrorist plots. Also, that trying to apply those models will result in a flurry of false negatives so large as to make the whole effort useless and a waste of resources which could otherwise be better spent. It's hard to argue with...
----- My opinions are my own, etc, etc.
As said in the comment above.. a decade ago. Sympathizers in the USA were well known for supporting the IRA (Provisional Irish Republican Army / Real IRA) in Ireland through the 80's and 90's, and the UK has constantly houded the US to combat this funding.
After 911 the US adminstration decreed along with the war on Terror - 'funding terrorism is a crime'. While the comment was primarliy aimed at Al-Queda, funding the IRA was (unintentionally?) put in the same category.
Its probably always been illegal to fund terrorism (IANAL), but I havent seen any arrests for funding the IRA hit the news, nor have i seen any Irish Americans thrown in GTMO. I'd say someone turned a blind eye.
Check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORAID
Why arent the former/current leaders and members of NORIAD in GTMO?