I like reading "Wired", but they really dropped the ball here.
The whole question of data mining is a hot topic, and there are going to be some public bombshells going off in this area pretty soon, if anyone has the balls to investigate.
Here are some of the things not discussed in the "Wired" article:(link)
http://www.wired.com/...
A presidentially authorized NSA program to "data mine" has little or nothing to do with finding terrorists. It cannot.
Why not?
Bruce Schneier mentions a couple good reasons why not, in his article for "Wired", but he fails to mention several hugely important things.
The whole idea of "data mining"- in reality, pattern recognition- first became known to me back in the 80's, during a late-night discussion with a close friend of mine who had gone to work for a major defense contractor and he told me of his work writing the code for a communications program to be used by NATO in Europe. It seemed there was a perceived security problem with the network of communications between bases and individuals, and my friend had been central in the creation of a surveillance program to look for key words at first, and then key phrases, and then, as computer technology got more powerful, more and more complex patterns that correlated strongly with dastardly deeds--or bad thoughts. The implications for civil society were immediately apparent, and were not a joke.
But life seems posessed of a tendency towards balance, and here is the counterweight that came along shortly. thereafter.
PGP
There is a very fine piece of work done by a brave guy named Phil Zimmerman called PGP- Pretty Good Privacy- that provides a robust cryptography system that is very, very costly in computer time to crack. When Phil invented it, he was pounced upon by every spook agency and enforcement wonk, lawyered half to death, threatened with jail and ruin, but he persevered. The spooks released a thousand bogus copies of PGP over the net that were loaded with back doors and Trojans, keystroke monitors and such, so Phil released the clean source code for all to read, so that people could assure themselves that there was nothing nasty stuck in there. There are now half a hundred easy to use, clean iterations of PGP, and they are everywhere.
So, --how stupid do we think they are?
Ask yourself- if you were the object of such a mind-boggling array of searchers and search tools, would you not take reasonable precautions with the communications of relatives and associates- and with your own? Bin Laden, sick and crippled, is still at large.
PGP has been cracked, --in a manner of speaking. But even today, every PGP message is very costly in computer time to decrypt, or the system would be useless.
Our whole commercial system relies on Public Key Codes like PGP. They better still work.
So, will they encrypt? Of course.
Chicken entrails
If you already know that you are onto the bad guys, if you already KNOW who you want to surveil, you just fire up your conceptual contraption of incalculable power that can suck the hidden meaning out of a puddle of desiccated chicken entrails in nanoseconds, ---and Voila! Al quaida's shopping list! But this does not help at all in FINDING them.
The problem is twofold: Data mining cannot usefully find very rare events, as "Wired" points out. But it also, in this century, cannot supply any content. It has to contend with a gigantic amount of powerfully encrypted material- in fact, millions of messages per HOUR. Yes, hour. Incredibly costly in time to decrypt, even a tiny part of it all. And most of the patterns that data mining can look for are broken by encryption. Unless you decrypt it all. Yoiks!
So what is all this stuff really good for?
For two other purposes that really, really should worry us.
Data mining of the kind authorized by Dubya is good, most of all, for collecting the kind of data that the East German Stazi obsessively collected and catalogued and stored, and fondled. Data about us. About everyone. But- -why? Who cares? I aint done nuthin, folks. Pure as driven snow. Right?
Right.
Spooks have, in my experience, an obsessive need to collect data, and to read meaning into it. Their lives are often isolated and ideologically driven, often very out of touch with the lives and thoughts of average people, and hence suspicious of them. They think we are dangerous, (I hope they are right) and THEY care.
Just as Dubya reacts reflexively, angrily to dissent or criticism, Richard Nixon hated the Viet Nam protesters in a very personal way. He caused to be formulated and then authorized the Huston Plan. He believed that the great unwashed- commie college students, pinko journalists, -us- had ruined his perfectly good war, and he was determined to prevent it from ever happening again. He suceeded, in part.
The Huston plan was a huge plan to infiltrate and to eavesdrop on just about everyone. If I recited the details, I would be accused of being a conspiracy theorist, so just research it, and read for yourself just how bizarre truth can sometimes be. Data mining, infiltration, compliant courts, student spooks--. Shades of Admiral Poindexter and TIA. But until the politicians of the time realized that Tricky Dick was listening in on THEIR communications first of all, not much happened. Then, suddenly FISA was created, and heads rolled. The attorney General of the United States, John Mitchell was indicted, FISA eventually emerged, and Nixon was a cooked goose.
Think of it- the Bush Administration, the most intensely political in history, where pracically everything is decided by the political wing--- and the overwhelming temptation to spook up the opposition. Suck up the democratic strategy (should there ever be one), And to get the goods on politicians whose support will be needed, ---or whose silence might be secured by a carefully placed hint about that mistress, that doubtful mess of contributions--that whiff of scandal that sometimes makes jailbirds out of princes.
Total Information Awareness.
Conspiracy stuff? No. History.
Deja Vu.
Jim Miller