Fergie's Tech Blog

The Right Questions are Key to NSA Data Mining

Jon Van writes in The Chicago Tribune:

Connecting the dots is difficult, but for homeland security agents, the real trick is figuring out where the dots are and which ones need connecting.

That analogy may be at the core of the federal government's interest in keeping tabs on telephone calls Americans make to each other every day. Government agents reportedly hope that computers can sift through the mountains of phone data to extract nuggets of information revealing terrorist plotters.

Only within the past decade has a subset of computer science called link mining even become available to attempt such a daunting task, though some researchers believe that even the most powerful computers will never deliver the answers that the government seeks.

posted by Fergie @ 5/14/2006 08:02:00 PM