Imagine what the Brits would have done with today’s NSA data mining / pattern seeking? Well, just look to your left and you can see what an enterprising data miner did with some Boston based Revolutionary data – who is talking to who. He had to put it together from a book:
I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the new-fangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects. This is in connection with the discussion of the role of “metadata” in certain recent events and the assurances of various respectable parties that the government was merely “sifting through this so-called metadata” and that the “information acquired does not include the content of any communications”. I will show how we can use this “metadata” to find key persons involved in terrorist groups operating within the Colonies at the present time. I shall also endeavour to show how these methods work in what might be called a relational manner.
…However, our current Eighteenth Century beta of PRISM has been used to collect and analyze information on more than two hundred and sixty persons (of varying degrees of suspicion) belonging variously to seven different organizations in the Boston area.
…Surely this is but a small encroachment on the freedom of the Crown’s subjects.
This was a sample of but 260 odd folks. Now, magnify that by HUNDREDS of millions of people, the higher level math / stats now available, and certainly more compute power than is being used to mine BitCoins. Now, what if Big Sis Napolitano over at DHS… decided that she wanted to nibble on this ginormous datasets (TEA Party? Limited Government? Fiscal Responsibility? Strict Constitutional outlook? Go to church often? Returning Vet from Iraq or Afghanistan? Yeah – you’re a risk as you have already been labeled a “domestic terrorist” by her reports)? Three Billion calls / day just from Verizon (and the other Telecoms are pretty in the picture) plus the data from the ISPs that have been tentacled in? Just imagine who is connected to who in there? Person A to 150 via phone calls, a few hundred by emails, thousands more by chats, and (yikes!) tens of thousands to millions of people to your blogposts, tweets, FB comments? Knowing all that, put the relationships together.
Now, stir in your financial transactions, especially credit card purchases. Here’s a product – a Gadsden Flag! Let’s play with the data and see what people, what groups of people, and geolocational clusters? Yeah – who cares who actually said what to whom (the contents of calls)…..for her purposes, all that is sufficient is determining the nexus points – who are people with red flags by their Parent records?
