Government report: Data mining doesn't work well

[Newsjock]

Source: CNet

The most extensive government report to date on whether terrorists can be identified through data mining has yielded an important conclusion: It doesn't really work.

A National Research Council report, years in the making and scheduled to be released Tuesday, concludes that automated identification of terrorists through data mining or any other mechanism "is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts." Inevitable false positives will result in "ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses" being incorrectly flagged as suspects.

The whopping 352-page report, called "Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists," amounts to at least a partial repudiation of the Defense Department's controversial data-mining program called Total Information Awareness, which was limited by Congress in 2003.

... But the authors conclude the type of data mining that government bureaucrats would like to do--perhaps inspired by watching too many episodes of the Fox series 24--can't work. "If it were possible to automatically find the digital tracks of terrorists and automatically monitor only the communications of terrorists, public policy choices in this domain would be much simpler. But it is not possible to do so."

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10059987-38.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

1. Another billion down the shitter.

[Whoa_Nelly]

2. How much $$$$$$$ spent to get to this conclusion?

and, how much $$$$$$$ spent to write the report?

[ElboRuum]

4. If they actually retire this stupid crap...

...the answer is "enough", if not, "too goddamn much".

[gratuitous]

3. It doesn't work for its stated purpose

That is, it can't prospectively (before the fact) identify jack shit. But if you want to build a case of guilt by association and innuendo, it's invaluable for subjecting someone you don't like to the death of a thousand cuts. One example: Terrorist Bad Guy calls a restaurant for some take out. You have a hankering for some Middle East food, and by coincidence, you call the same restaurant within a few minutes. Considering the desperation being shown right now by the Republican standard bearers, it's no stretch at all to see a desperate prosecutor bringing the full weight of the law down on you or me or some other poor schmuck because we were jonesing for some tabouleh one night. The data has been strip mined, and your name came up. Can you prove you aren't involved with terrorists? You have three minutes: Go!

[not fooled]

5. Or just a cover...

...to surveil and collect dirt on your political opposition.:mad:

[Festivito]

8. Or, close it down and shred it before another admin enters.

Or, just have an expressed reason for running those shredders right now.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

6. Oh sure, they gather a lot of data.

So much data in the moment and over time, that the NSA's computer center has brought the Northern VA power grid to its knees. But once you have all this data, then you have to do something with it and that's where the whole thing gets really dicey. Now, these bureaucrats and political appointees have their wishlists they go shopping with, to all their favorite contractors. Now, of course, the contractors know that there is no software under the sun that can do what these geniuses want it to do, but the contractors ain't gonna tell them that: they are gonna say "SURE! WE CAN DO THAT!", hire a bunch of the same programming geniuses that wrote the software that created the CDS and Derivatives Markets(and we know how THAT turned out), knowing full well that they are just gonna blow through the contracted development amount, go into cost overruns and make some real gelt. Hell, they might never deliver a working solution that does 25% of what the geniuses want, but there won't be penalties, just Fat City. Just that sort of thing has happened at the FBI, more than once.

After all, it's just taxpayer dollars. Mad money, really.

Databases have their place, but they are limited in what they can do. Programmers have, in the interest of making themselves a pile, promoted them as tools of unlimited possibility, that there is nothing they cannot do, and they can keep the error rate low. But that error rate is always a percentage, and when you have multiple millions, if not billions of tables in that database, and a lot of that data has been entered by error-prone people, you start getting into one hell of a huge number of errors. Considering that an error, in projects like these, can get people imprisoned or killed, that is one hell of a dangerous panacea.

All because software salemen and marketing people lie as a matter of course.

[aquart]

7. Oh, they thought it was for catching terrorists?

Nuh uh. It was for spying on political opposition in America. For the sufficiently paranoid, I expect it worked just fine.

[AndyTiedye]

12. It's Great for Blackmail

Ever wonder why so many Dems bend over whenever Bush** wants something from Congress?

[HopeHoops]

9. Their "data mining" has found 27 women named Bertha with warts in private parts but no terrorists.

$$$$$$$$$ to Bush friends - that's all it is.

[JohnyCanuck]

10. But the MIC says just keep sending more billion our way for R&D

and we are sure we'll iron out the bugs eventually.

[jobendorfer]

11. It's Called the Law of Large Numbers ...

Run 300 million of anything through any kind of detector, you get false positives. A lot of them.

J.

[faulknercindy]

13. It does if

you know what in hell you are doing. Just ask any retail online store.

[The Backlash Cometh]

14. No effing shat.

In ten years I expect to find they wasted their time collecting folders on at least half of us.

[hootinholler]

15. God, I could have told them that a long time ago.

In fact they who run the program are quite aware of its autonomous limitations which is why they are using a slurp and burp approach. They slurp and store everything, then when one person is identified, everything about them is burped back out (or that's the vein that is mined).

-Hoot