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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."
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.
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.
I seem to recall that much of this was gutted by Congress in the 1990s when they didn't want intelligence operatives paying off criminals for information, on the risk that the money might be tied back to the United States. This severely nerfed the ability of the CIA (among others) to gather HUMINT, as paid informants were a significant source of the information required to infiltrate the groups in the first place. I don't recall if this was ever overturned, though.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
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?
I bet this will not change what they are doing or how they are doing it one bit.
They'll be sure to change the amount of money spent on the program. I don't need to clarify whether it'll be more or less, its too obvious.
Whenever something doesn't work in government it seems to get more money and more power.
That leads me to think that maybe the primary function of government is to pretend to fail.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
"...gutted by Congress in the 1990s when they didn't want intelligence operatives paying off criminals for information..."
They're still doing it here in the US. The FBI paid a shady informant 230,000 bucks to rat out harmless, loud-mouthed nobodies as part of this case:
The government had no direct evidence. The confession was vague and even contradictory. And the statements about attacking American targets came only after heavy prompting from FBI interrogators.
America's FBI: "Incompetance and Pusillanimity through Proxy".
It used to be. It has, alas, becime utterly devoid of meaning.
Free Martian Whores!
Don't forget about the military, who stupidly booted some of their translator recruits (yes, middle-eastern languages) for being....OMG TEH GAY!!!1!