I think this article is quite pertinent to the post.
Most of the comments regarding this post strike me as completely not understanding what is really going on and they seem way to alarmist to me.
While I am a big fan of privacy, I do not think that the current situation warrants lawsuits against NASA or Northwest.
Let me try to clarify what is going on here a little bit. First let me say that I am a Ph.D. student working on "data mining" and that this is the prespective from which I am going to analize this matter. Here are some potential issues that I want to clarify:
Q: What is going on here? A: A feasibility study was done in order to asses the potential of "data mining" for terrorist activity detection.
Q: What does NASA has to do with it? A: NASA has a good deal of very smart people working on "data mining" for a couple of decades already. This is because "data mining" is about detecting patterns in data and NASA was interested in detecting patterns in a lot of space related programs. SETI is one popular instance of this [where the data consists of radio signals and the mining consists in trying to find patterns that would indicate extraterestrial intelligence]. So in conclusion the reason NASA was involved is because some of their people have good expertise in data mining. [Probably better than NSA]
Why did Northwest released private data? A: Short answer: Because there ain't such a thing as "data mining" without data. And in the same way you cannot learn how to drill for oil on mars because there is no oil there, the data had to be "real data" in order for the asessment to be valid.
What if the assesment would have been favorable? Would this thing mean that the goverment would pass a law in order to gain access to private data from Airline companies?
A: Probably not. [But given some precedents I would not bet my life on it so we have to keep on watching it]. The reason is that there is a lot of work going on privacy preserving "data mining" where a party can expose a database to another party in such way that limits the query capabilities or perturbs them, such that the identity of the persons in the databse is not revealed but data mining is yet possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me try to clarify what is going on here a little bit. First let me say that I am a Ph.D. student working on "data mining" and that this is the prespective from which I am going to analize this matter. Here are some potential issues that I want to clarify:
Q: What is going on here? A: A feasibility study was done in order to asses the potential of "data mining" for terrorist activity detection.
Q: What does NASA has to do with it? A: NASA has a good deal of very smart people working on "data mining" for a couple of decades already. This is because "data mining" is about detecting patterns in data and NASA was interested in detecting patterns in a lot of space related programs. SETI is one popular instance of this [where the data consists of radio signals and the mining consists in trying to find patterns that would indicate extraterestrial intelligence]. So in conclusion the reason NASA was involved is because some of their people have good expertise in data mining. [Probably better than NSA]
Why did Northwest released private data? A: Short answer: Because there ain't such a thing as "data mining" without data. And in the same way you cannot learn how to drill for oil on mars because there is no oil there, the data had to be "real data" in order for the asessment to be valid.
What if the assesment would have been favorable? Would this thing mean that the goverment would pass a law in order to gain access to private data from Airline companies? A: Probably not. [But given some precedents I would not bet my life on it so we have to keep on watching it]. The reason is that there is a lot of work going on privacy preserving "data mining" where a party can expose a database to another party in such way that limits the query capabilities or perturbs them, such that the identity of the persons in the databse is not revealed but data mining is yet possible.