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Anti-Terrorist Data Mining Doesn't Work Very Well
Presto Vivace and others sent us this CNet report on a just-released NRC report coming to the conclusion, which will surprise no one here, that data mining doesn't work very well. It's all those darn false positives. The submitter adds, "Any chance we could go back to probable cause?" "A report scheduled to be released on Tuesday by the National Research Council, which has been years in the making, concludes that automated identification of terrorists through data mining or any other mechanism 'is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts.' Inevitable false positives will result in 'ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses' being incorrectly flagged as suspects. The whopping 352-page report, called 'Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists,' amounts to [be] at least a partial repudiation of the Defense Department's controversial data-mining program called Total Information Awareness, which was limited by Congress in 2003."
I bet this will not change what they are doing or how they are doing it one bit.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
I'm probably going to get creamed for this, but what is that image linked to?
I'm young, get over it.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
The Constitution is there for a reason.
you had me at #!
In other news, water is wet, the Pope is Catholic, and Ursines excrete solid wastes in silviculture.
That is all.
And several billion dollars.
And unrestrained access to all of the personal information about everyone that can be gotten by whatever means.
It'll probably still suck then, too.
What we really need are spies. Not so much in the US, here good old fashioned detective work (with Warrants) should work.
But over seas a standing army isn't going to do anything to quell terrorism. Tanks and plans will only inspire more terrorism. What we need are good old fashioned black ops. Undercover agents penetrating the terrorist groups and talking to the bad guys. Much less collateral damage as well.
We'd get a lot further with a couple guys with silenced pistols rather than a whole army.
Eschew Obfuscation
As any Cold War spy can tell you, if you "fit the profile" of a normal law-abiding person with just enough "off-perfect" things in your life so you don't seem "too perfect," it's much easier to blend in.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
enough data in any kind of real time to make this work.
Years ago, we were playing with a design of a system to track all the phone calls made on the AT&T network over a 3 month period. (not record the calls, just track the billing info). The machine that management wanted to try and do it on could not hold enough data just to store the data, let alone process it. And that was the largest theoretical model of hte machine there was (about 4 times the size fo the largest one in use at the time). They really needed one about 10 times as large as the largest theoretical one, just to store the data!
Multiple that by the rest of the items one buys during the day, and we can not track all the daa that is out there.
Why did they even waste the money to do the testing and the reports?
probably cause it a lot cheaper than data-mining.
I thought we already knew this. If the algorithm comes back with even .1% false positives the system is totally worthless. There's 365 million people in the US, .1% means that the FBI/CIA/NSA would have 365,000 people to investigate. Now go and talk to someone in the AI field and see if even .1% false positive is possible.
I'm betting that if a system is going to catch any decent percentage of terrorists (greater than 50%) the false positive rate will be above 1%. Even if you only apply the system to a relatively small number of people (say people entering a leaving the country) you are going to have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people to investigate. Combine any kind of realistic false positive rate with the fact that about .00001% of the population deserves to be investigated and the system is worse than worthless; all it will do is distract from the people who should be investigated.
They have it backwards. Instead of the government knowing everything about the citizens, we need to let the citizens know everything about the government.
Another problem is that even where information is available, the current administration chooses to ignore it. They knew that 9/11-style attacks were imminent, yet they failed to lock the cockpit doors. They knew our economy was headed for disaster, yet they failed to reign in the financiers. SEC, NSA, CIA, DOD, DOJ... all worse than useless in the last 8 years.
Take off the limits placed by congress!
...
3 2 1
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Causes mine YOU.
Vote for me.
I'd take their "no fly" list and identify every single person on it who was a legitimate threat and either have them under 24 hour surveillance or arrested.
The mere concept of a list of names of people who are too "dangerous" to let fly ... but not dangerous enough to track ... that just fucking stupid.
Think about how many people could be killed in the airport terminal itself WITHOUT getting on a plane ... say during the Thanksgiving or Christmas rushes there.
What idiot would let the people on that list (if they were really a threat) into a terminal? Wouldn't you expect them to STOP them BEFORE they get into a position to do that kind of damage?
But if spies could work, then so could computers.
It's not like you can send in a spy and they try and get a job at the Defense Ministry.. there is no terrorist defense ministry.
You have to send in a spy, and he or she is going to go around 2000 villages in northern Pakistan trying to find a terrorist ring. What do you do? Ask, "hey, do you know anyone who has an atomic bomb?"
In fact, you need to have lots of spies talking to lots of people, almost like a police state, and that set of spies has to be on top of the whole social fabric of the society in detail and in numbers. It turns out, in fact, that you DO need an army to stay on top of all of it!
This is my sig.
Thank Carter first of all, and then the technocrats who keep thinking that satellites and planes can replace boots/sandals on the ground. It was decided that the U.S. would only deal with honest, law-abiding citizens in our efforts to catch criminals, terrorists, dictators, etc. What a crock of nonsense. If you want to get the bad guy, you're going to have to get close to him and sometimes that means making deals with "bad" people. Unfortunately, it takes decades to recruit, train, and emplace a spy network, and invariably there will be some blowback from the mainstream/liberal media because we made a deal with some slimeball so we could get the bigger slimeball. The spy game is dirty and nasty, but the payoffs can be tremendous when we can catch people like Bin Laden or stop events like 9/11 from happening.
Impetuous! Homeric!
As can be seen in the recent "terrorist" arrests in the US. Once you start paying people to turn in "terrorists", you start a market in "terrorists".
So the guy who wants to sell a "terrorist" to the government finds some idiot who meets the basic criteria (non-Christian, non-white) and encourages that idiot to make inflammatory statements while being recorded.
Ka-CHING!
That notwithstanding, researchers did suggest that stores could sell more Kalashnikovs by placing them next to the diapers...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
They do it in the movies so it must be possible.
If you're not doing anything wrong then what are you worried about?
No sig today...
if your goal is intelligence gathering, data mining is rather weak. signs and portents. an increase of chatter hear, an interesting whisper of a phrase there. nothing even remotely solid or actionable, but perhaps something to attune your intelligence gathering in your more concrete and reliable methodologies
datamining is something to back up a hunch, something to suggest an avenue to look where you might find more, something better than a wild ass guess about where to look. but certainly not a front line tool, and certainly not the first place you visit, nor proof of anything. its not evidence, its just scattershot impressionism, to guide you in vague ways. your front line tools are spies and moles. perhaps 1% of their work is supported by or guided by data mining
but, even so, data-mining will never stop
data mining will just devolve in the level of respect it gets to the level of respect it deserves: very little. it's too undependable, foggy, and worse, its subject to counterintelligence manipulation
data mining is not completely useless. just almost completely useless
and so it will still continue, because something is better than nothing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
in October 1997, President Bill Clinton used the line-item veto to cancel the $39 million allocated for the SR-71
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
It still doesn't stop the uninformed from spending billions on tracking associations anyway. Oh, have an obligatory Onion link
that the guy named Osama Bin Laden who runs a convenience store on the west side of Chicago isn't the guy who arranged to have airplanes fly into large buildings a few years ago, right? Can we repeal the Patriot Act now?
I know this is slashdot and all, but if anybody's actually interested in looking at the full report, it's available for reading in pdf format online.
http://www.ocolly.okstate.edu/issues/2001_Fall/011011/pix/1.%20OSAMA%20BIN%20LADEN.jpg
This is NOT a terrorist:
http://imagecache2.allposters.com/images/pic/MMPH/242259~Cliff-Richard-Posters.jpg
See! Clearly a difference. Easy.
I don't see the problem...
Deleted
So, if dataming doesn't work, you take away profiling as a legal option, what's law enforcement supposed to do!
dB Masters
The biggest problem is actually not the false positives - that would just mean extra wasted effort to screen the individuals, which "only" costs time and money.
The larger problem is that in order to do any real good you need an unbelievably low false negative rate. Let's take the 9/11 hijackers as an example: they were only about 0.00000667% of the population. Unless you could capture all but 2 or 3 them, you're still vulnerable to the plot unless you can get one of the ones you captured to spill the beans - at best you've just mitigated the plot. How realistic is it that ALL 20 (or 19 if you believe that Zacarias Moussaoui was not part of the conspiracy) of them could have been identified (let alone captured) using such a method, even given the expenditure of vast resources sifting through all of the false positives? Even if 4 or 5 of them manage to fall in the "negative" group or, alternatively, if they're able to slip through your second-level screening procedures, you still have a disaster on your hands.
It's not likely that you could get the accuracy high enough to stop very many plots by itself, I suspect.
I mean look:
A terrorist:
http://images.google.co.uk/images?hl=en&q=A%20terrorist&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi
Not a terrorist:
http://images.google.co.uk/images?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&q=Not+a+terrorist&btnG=Search+Images
Problem solved. NEXT!
Deleted
So, our super-duper-not-Orwellian-really datamining system can't be used to save us from The Terrorist Threat(tm) because of too many false positives. Luckily, I have a solution. These so called "false" positives are guilty of obstructing justice and making us all more vulnerable to terror.
See, no more false positives!
So let's just give up then.
I hate people who, when they can't find a solution, just give up.
I am a firm believer that, there is ALWAYS a solution. If you can't find it you didn't try hard enough.
____________________________
Always look on the bright side of life.
I'll try anything once. Twice if it tastes good
National Republican Convention?
I realize this is likely starting to sound old, but Cory Doctorow's Little Brother should be required reading for people doing something like this. His writings about the "Paradox of the False Positive" are enumerated there, but also in other sources:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/20/rare.events
(emphasis mine)
And, as others have pointed out, this system is likely to have a false positive rate higher than 1%.
Is it just me, or should the be data mining for terrorist, not anti-terrorists? It is the War on Terrorism right, not War on Anti-Terrorism?
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
We got here thanks to all the whining and complaining that The Man(tm) was unfairly targeting minorities (and, eventually, everyone) by profiling. Then, people bitched when they started searching grannies too in order to show "random sampling." Well, without being able to target folks based on statistical likelihood because of cries of racism/bigotry and then not being able to search anyone because it was done "stupidly," what are they left with? Blanket searches in the hope that looking in the right spots will yield evidence obvious enough to grant a warrant.
Are you seriously surprised? Hell, if this turns out better than the high-risk credit crisis we're in which was brought about by the same whining and complaining about racism/bigotry, I'LL be pleasantly surprised.
Inevitable false positives will result in 'ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses' being incorrectly flagged as suspects.
We consider everybody as innocent unless proven guilty, and treat everybody decently. A false positive shouldn't seem so bad. Should it?
I have BEEN on that list. Why? My name is extremely common. So every time I went to the airport to check in, some person at the counter would get a little wide eyed, then say "oh there's a little problem with your ticket, I need your drivers license just a minute." Then I'd bite my tongue to avoid saying "don't fucking lie to me just go into the back room and call the 1-800 number, find out I'm not a terrorist, and let me go on my way."
They go into the back room, and call DHS, holding up the line for five minutes to an hour (yes it was an hour once, I almost missed my flight), then come back looking a little relieved and give me my drivers license.
The "no fly" list is completely pathetic. Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy was on it once.
At $8/hr TSA-guy isn't paid to think.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Having personally used Multiple Data Mining techniques for several years now - It's not that Data Mining doesn't work, rather it's how its used. Data Mining is great at trend forecasting and if you're really good at what you're doing in it you can factor in probabilities of certain future events. The one key factor in data mining is a "Training Set" of Data to teach the machine(s) how to recognize the patterns. Since I suspect Terrorist come from every walk of life, every know nationality, and are using 1 off events this is throwing them a few headaches. The real key is to of course define what is normal, but if the rest of the world is as normal as are we here in the US they don't have a chance to pin point the Target Data (in this case people).
I would also suspect that the Terrorist Motives might be a key factor, but it's like pulling teeth to get any US Administration to admit that their foreign policy is screw up beyond belief, let alone something like a cruddy foreign policy might just result in cruddy foreign relations or popular uprisings around the world. If they did, then we wouldn't need data mining in the first place.
"May You - Live Long and Prosper in Interesting Times" -- by deweycheetham
Defense and LE contractors will pay big PAC money to politicians and beltway bandits to dispute these findings. They see the Iraq war winding down and the economy faltering, so the government trough could run dry. Data mining was a big bucks adventure, but not anymore if this report is taken seriously.
There is no contradiction. Those flagged by the software can be quietly investigated by the government... But an existence of any such an investigation shall not be deemed grounds for, uhm, anything — none of "No Fly" list bullshit, etc... We've always had the notion of "innocent until proven guilty" — but we have not always followed it, because "there is no smoke without fire". Well, there can be — if the smoke-detector raises a false alarm.
Let the software pick up suspects. But let's not treat these innocent people any different — until proven guilty.
Much like a broken smoke detector waking you up in the middle of the night is not grounds for rejecting the idea of automatic smoke detection altogether, this technology can be extremely useful...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Yes, because we need an aircraft that can fly faster than mach 3 above 80,000 feet to penetrate terrorist airspace and evade terrorist fighter jets.
They use Predator drones now because, well, they were not manufactured in the 60s, they cost magnitudes less for the same mission, they can perform more than one type of mission, they are unmanned, etc. etc. etc. etc.
The SR-71 was cool and all, but way too antiquated to keep around. Clinton made a good move killing the SR-71.
By the way, how did the SR-71 help anyway? It gave us zero insight into the Soviets...in fact, it did far worse by giving us false insight. It was a waste of money from conception to retirement. But...damn, it was cool...
IANYL, IANAL, TINLA, IANAMD, IANAP,
No. False positives "only" cost the government time and money. For the individuals falsely suspected, it could cost them their career, their relationships, their home, and their freedom, depending on how much "time and money" the government spends on them before realizing they are innocent. (If they ever do, since -- as shocking as it sounds -- there have been a few cases reported where individuals were detained indefinitely without charges, or even evidence.)
I am the man with no sig!
I just saw on TV the right way to do this is to find some guy named "chuck" who is the intersect... ;^)
While you're waiting, think about that poor fellow who saw his friend at the airport and yelled "Hi, Jack!"
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Yeah I guess a Predator with its 400nmi range helps out when you can not get close to the country so you can launch one of the drones. Or you could use an SR-71 with its 2,900nmi range. And yeah a nice jet could come in handy once China gets pissed off at us....
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
!suddenoutbreakofcommonsense
No. False positives "only" cost the government time and money. For the individuals falsely suspected, it could cost them their career, their relationships, their home, and their freedom, depending on how much "time and money" the government spends on them before realizing they are innocent.
Not exactly - it also depends on what you DO with the false positives; the negative consequences that you mention only come about if the government takes concrete action against them based solely on "fitting the profile" (Often by holding them for long periods of time without a trial; they'd need more than a profile to bring someone to trial). Although there have been a few highly publicized cases such as you mention, for most such individuals it's no more than an occasional inconvenience, if they're even aware of being on the list at all. Not that I'm excusing the government for some of the things they've done to certain individuals, but those actions are really a separate issue from whether those people were falsely identified in a profile list.
Given the huge number of false positives that are inevitable in such a scheme, the only thing that makes sense to do with anyone identified in such a list is to investigate them more carefully, not to detain them or otherwise make it impossible for them to function in society.
It is, of course, trivially easy to construct a profiling technique that will have ZERO false negatives: Simply put EVERYONE on the list! But then your profiling scheme has rendered itself redundantly redundant. But it does illustrate the difficulty: In order to reduce the false negatives to be (effectively) zero, it is necessary to vastly increase the number of false positives. This is elementary statistics.
I said it before and I'll say it again: Any model that is built on 10 or 20 positive examples from a population of 6,000,000,000 is going to suffer from overfitting. Not just a little overfitting... I mean it's going to overfit like a mo-fo. There's just no way, and I mean NO way, to create a statistically significant test based on the data we have on who is and who is not an ACTUAL terrorist.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
Dude you seriously need to learn more about statistics.
I was wondering whether techniques of commercial data mining could be applied to environmental problems like emerging disease surveillance.
Well, of course they can. The question is how far is it from practical? I think, pretty far from being as practical as it is in business.
First of all, businesses have a great deal of object model in common: they have common concepts like customers, products, sales, brands etc., which form a common framework in which they can do all kinds of creative thinking, or if not thinking you can even discover relationships using some kind of machine learning.
Secondly, when you are dealing with business data, the most important events tend to be common events. The most important common event is when a customer buys something. When you talk about something like a new disease emerging, or somebody committing a crime like hijacking or bombing, the most important events are exceeding rare, but catastrophic. Therefore the connection between events we do have in abundance and the events we are interested in is tenuous, poorly statistically attested to, and in many cases pure conjecture.
Finally, a lot of what businesses use data mining for is tweaking marginal costs and revenue by shifting dollars that were already going to be spent from one place to another. Offer product A to this web visitor instead of B. Stock more of item X in the store rather than Y. If you really don't know a priori whether X or Y will sell more profitably, you probably aren't going to go too wrong.
In something like environmental monitoring, you create expenses that weren't already there. No, you can't drain this lake because the model predicts a 5% marginal increase in the probability of human cases of hantavirus in the area. To somebody counting on the economic value of draining that lake, that's a brand new cost that wasn't there before.
Same goes, even more so, to deciding somebody is a danger to society.
Now let me say that I have no doubt that data mining will lead to more terrorist being thwarted or captured, compared to doing nothing else. Of course so would a lottery, but I suspect that data mining is a great deal better at identifying good suspects than a lottery. However, it is for reasons I noted above not going to be particularly accurate, certainly not compared to probable cause. Furthermore, the marginal cost of false positives gained seems likely to exceed the marginal value of false negatives lost, if such things could be quantified.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Just like anything else, there's a right way to go about something
and a wrong way to go about someting. Data mining for terrorists is
quite possible (despite what the article and report claims).
However, certain things are just obviously wrong to anyone that's
ever tried this sort of thing. Namely, you don't try to identify
people by name only. This is why the no fly list is such a joke.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Bob Blakley wrote a great piece on the no fly list. His solution - put everyone on the no fly list. That's about as effective as the current solution. http://notabob.blogspot.com/2008/07/round-up-usual-suspects.html
Terror plane bomb nuke Pakistan Allah death to America
Refer to my last paragraph about the SR-71 being, at best, useless for intelligence. This sentiment, of course, goes with the general theme that you cannot replace people on the ground with planes and satellites. Would could have avoided the Cold War if we knew Russia was actually falling apart. Something we couldn't know by just flying the SR-71 over their country to photograph things they probably placed in plain sight specifically to be photographed.
Plus, I suggest you re-read the paragraph from which you cherry picked the information about Clinton using a line item veto.
The reactivation met much resistance: the Air Force had not budgeted for the aircraft, and UAV developers worried that their programs would suffer if money was shifted to support the SR-71s. Also, with the allocation requiring yearly reaffirmation by Congress, long-term planning for the SR-71 was difficult.[19] In 1996, the Air Force claimed that specific funding had not been authorized, and moved to ground the program. Congress reauthorized the funds, but, in October 1997, President Bill Clinton used the line-item veto to cancel the $39 million allocated for the SR-71. In June 1998, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the line-item veto was unconstitutional. All this left the SR-71's status uncertain until September 1998, when the Air Force called for the funds to be redistributed. The plane was permanently retired in 1998.
Clinton doesn't sound like much of a douche when you word it that way, does he?
IANYL, IANAL, TINLA, IANAMD, IANAP,
Reminds me of an incident where the TSA tried to protect me (the public) from me (their fictitious concept of me.)
We have met the enemy and he is congress.
Bloody hell. Somebody should be shot for wasting our resources when our infrastructure is threatened with neglect.
The entire concept of data-mining to stop terrorists depends on the idea that terrorists have no that the government is data-mining and espionage cannot be accomplished without modern communications.
We are talking about data-mining on a public website, so the first part is out and if the second part was true it would stand to reason that no spying happened before 1900 or so.
Somewhere along the line the government has forgotten that you can set up meetings months in advance, never touch a cell phone or computer, and enter the country without going through official check-points.
Even if the government could design a system that was 100% accurate and never generated any false positives the terrorists could simply go back to doing the things that all spy's did before recent history.
Whats more, THIS IS PROBABLY WHAT'S HAPPENING.
Why do people still stubbornly insist that flagging 'terrorists' was ever the reason for all of this data-mining? Don't people understand the hidden agenda is to develop detailed dossiers on every single ordinary US national?
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Just compile a list of all the extremely illegal and unethical things you're doing as a government and find the groups of people most impacted.
Let those people simmer for 5-10 years under your asshattery and let cool. Presto! A tasty terrorist.. Bon Appetite!
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
You really thing they are doing the data mining to find terrorists?
What a small world you live in.
It turns out that terrorism in western countries is a very rare thing, outside of a few hot areas like Spain's Basque area. This is very good, by the way.
Mining for rare event is extremely difficult. Bayes' s rule indicates that if in a database there are 0.01% actually suspicious events and your mining algorithms are extremely effective at 99% accuracy, then you still have an approximately 100:1 false positive ratio, which makes the mining still useless.
Probably because of all that goatse and trolling you did on slashdot. Imagine the scene in the White House:
Dick Cheney: This Anonymous Coward guy is writing bad stuff about us on Slashdot again.
George Bush: What's that Lord Vader? I was just choking on a pretzel and I couldn't hear you. *GGGGHHHHACCKK* *GGGHHAACKK*
Dick Cheney: Boy I say boy, this Anonymous Coward guy is writing bad stuff about us on slashdot again.
George Bush: Let me take a look at that Dick! You know this internet thing is a series of tubes? Al Gore told me. By George, you're right! Anonymous Coward is writing bad stuff about us! And look, he's written half the stuff on this page!
Dick Cheney: He's got comments all over this page too. This demands serious action!
George Bush: Nukular action! We're going to nuke somebody at last! I'll get the football briefcase! Yeee hawwww! Gimme an N! Gimme a U! Gimme a K! Gimme a E! Whaduzzitspell? NUKULAR!!
Dick Cheney: George, I told you, we can't nuke anybody. No, I think we should just add this Anonymous Coward terrorist to The No Fly List. That'll put a crimp in his evil plan!
George Bush: No nukes? SOB! But you promised I could nuke somebody!
Dick Cheney: I did not promise that! I told you to stop acting like a baby and we could talk about it later!
George Bush: Waaaahhhh! I wanna nuke somebody! You promised!
Dick Cheney: <clickety-click> There, that's got Anonymous Coward added to the list. Now to sit back and wait for him to fall into my trap. MWUUHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAAAAAA!!!
George Bush: Hey Unca Dick! Can I have another pretzel?
Dick Cheney: Sure kid, knock yourself out.
AND NOW YOU KNOW HOW IT HAPPENED.
Or do you?Or do you?
For that, you have the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MQ-9_Reaper#Specifications
nosig today
Instead, they aim to produce a scholarly evaluation of the current technologies that exist for data mining, their effectiveness, and how government agencies should use them to limit false positives--of the sort that can result in situations like heavily-armed SWAT teams raiding someone's home and shooting their dogs based on the false belief that they were part of a drug ring.
Maybe this was just part of the 'War on Terriers.'
Just because it's not entirely clear to me. What exactly is the problem with flagging innocents as "suspect" ?
I understand that flagging them as "guilty" would be unacceptable. But if a program tells someone where to look, and it turns out there's nothing there how is that different from letting a human identify what's suspect ? Humans make (many) mistakes too.
Another problem is that "probable cause" obviously doesn't work unless there is a utterly massive sentiment against terrorism, and for good or for worse, that simply doesn't exist in some countries (yes those with a certain religion, but even some communist countries, atheist by definition have the same problem).
Probable cause is nothing more than the "feeling" of a single person. Not something I'd call anywhere near impartial.
And yes I've checked, these people are screened intensively. They are, however not barred from flight or anything such. Yes their suitcases are searched, and they themselves too. But nothing more.
So ... what's the problem here ? Surely law enforcement is allowed to indentify something as "suspect" ?
I should scorn you for use of "retards..." ...but that was pretty fucking funny.
Like airport security, data mining for terrorists works perfectly for the actual purpose.
It is about showing voters that "Something is being done!"
Expecting these systems to catch terrorists or secure the public is fantasy. As an example, suppose the next terrorism attack is about introducing radioactive material into the water supplies of a city. Who is protecting the reservoirs, the dams and every metre of pipeline?
What if a terrorist cell was looking to blow up buildings from the inside? Do security guards check what is inside the photocopier being delivered? Some knowledge of procedure is all that's required to deliver devastating attacks.
It's easy to go on, but the point is that there are too many possible vectors of attack to secure them all. Instead, the visible ones have a lot of highly visible processes introduced, and people everywhere know that "something is being done!"
(The reality that terrorists generally aren't very competant doesn't get the voters behind you, and won't be pitched any time soon.)
It's the same with data mining. "Something is being done!" It doesn't matter that real terrorists may have almost no consistent data profile, it matters only that the project is highly visible, costs an enormous amount and is talked about often.
Once you start talking about tens of millions of dollars, vast databases and all the really clever people working on the project, most voters will be so impressed they won't need evidence of success. It all sounds so damn good! I mean, your home computer may cost a thousand dollars, and look at what it can do! Imagine spending a hundred million dollars - what could it *not* do?
A secondary win for the project is that someone gets to try their pet project out, and maybe link enough data together to build up a really great voter profiling tool.
It's sad, but the whole "beefing up security" after 11-Sep-2001 was more like the plot of "Yes Minister" than "The West Wing."