Can security agencies sift through all the mounds of data to track down terrorist networks without a good lead? It seems they could use a lesson from marketing companies who can routinely predict who you will vote for, where you will eat dinner, and, most of all, what products you will buy.
The National Security Agency has amassed a database of 2 trillion telephone calls since 2001. Details of the NSA's activities remain unclear. This WashingtonPost. com article states that data mining experts say they are puzzled about how the information might be used. It would work best, they say, when investigators can trace telephone numbers of known suspects and build a web of contacts, in much the same way police use phone records to track drug traffickers.
Even though they have no firsthand knowledge of the NSA's program, Krebs and other data mining experts, some of whom requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of their work, agreed to discuss how such a mountain of information might be used.
In theory, experts said, modern computers also allow investigators to move in the other direction -- to identify telephone use patterns in a call record database and work forward until a suspect's name drops out. But these "inductive" techniques are far more difficult and less reliable, the experts said, because it is virtually impossible to distinguish a web of suspicious linkages from a harmless one in an immense, unedited bundle of numbers.
"I'm sure the NSA is excellent at finding patterns and motifs in the data, but what do they mean?" Krebs asked. "Unless you start getting more information on the patterns, you're not going to be able to interpret them at all. Patterns alone won't tell you whether someone's good or evil."
Read the full article here.
Know More about data mining at ITechTips.com.
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