NSA Data Mining

Poll

NSA is reportedly data mining a huge database of US domestic calls to find potential terrorists. Your opinion: [150 votes total] Approve - mining call info can catch terrorists, not concerned about privacy issues (36) 24% Disapprove - this is a vast and unchecked invasion of privacy, and mining will be ineffective (76) 51% Not sure how to balance these privacy and security issues (25) 17% Don't care (13) 9%

Comments

Ben, NSA
The data mining has some good possibility. The benefit is probably greatest as a post mortem to understand how a network functons.

my broad worry is that the NSA gets tempted to use the database for other worry such as tracking who journalists call, speculative criminal intent detection, etc...

Data Mining Research, NSA Data Mining
Last year when I was on the phone with my brother who was living in Canada at the time, we were complaining about the current U.S. government's positions on a variety of issues. Our call was abruptly ended -- coincidence? I'm not so sure.

Editor, NSA Data Mining
NSA can start with some known bad guys, and see who they call, then see who those guys call, etc.
NSA can also see if there are regular call to/from country X from/to some set of numbers.
There is a whole new research area called social network analysis that shows how much can be found from link analysis. Of course, there would be very many false positives unless call info is combined with more information