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

The strength of weak links...

[nweaver]

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?