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A Data Miner's perspective on the NSA Database
excerpt:
excerpt:
Who are they really spying on?
All of this brings us to ask who the real targets of all of this spying is. In truth, it could be the terrorists. In order to identify them, you need to know an awful lot about those who are not terrorists. This helps to eliminate false positives. However, the data for terrorists is so sparse, that even if a possible terrorist is identified, the algorithms used will rarely generate a high probability and a high confidence. In other words, little, if any actionable intelligence. On the other hand, if you want to predict how a person will vote in a given election, you can get an amazingly accurate prediction from the high-quality data from Joe and Jane Sixpack.
Which brings us to the Big Question: Why?
We have wondered for years how the Rethugs can keep squeaking out wins in elections they should lose. We know that their data miner of choice, ChoicePoint, was the company that purged the Florida voter rolls in the 2000 election. And Lo! They pop up again in the NSA scandal. It does not take a data miner to see that these thugs don't ever intend to lose an election again.
