This week the Department of Homeland Security received the results from a study by the National Research Council [full report] that the DHS funded. The study's conclusion: data mining for terrorists does not work and it invades the privacy of innocent citizens. Searching for the terrorist needle in the haystack of phone-calls and emails is counter-productive.
I told you so... here, here, here, here, and here.
However, if you start with a known suspect or two, you can roll up the rest of the network with normal surveillance techniques. Rather than dig through millions of records looking for that unknown terrorist pattern, give the phone company the numbers of known suspects/terroists and have them return the 2-step network neighborhood of each number -- now you can see the terror suspect's extended social graph. This approach with social network analysis also uncloaks street gangs and criminal networks.
UPDATE: ABC News has more on surveillance of US Citizens abroad.
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2 comments:
How much more handy to collect all the data first, so that you can see the extended graph of any suspect without needing a pesky warrant.
:^(
I always wanted to be a secret agent. I guess I'll go back to invading phone-user privacy for strickly commercial reasons. I mean: that was the reason I became an economist in the first place: money.
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