Fergie's Tech Blog

Total Information Awareness Techniques in NSA Sweeps

It's not just about who calls who. The NSA phone-monitoring project looks at how terrorists place their calls – and then applies that model to everyone, to see who else might be a suspect. It's a form of predictive data mining made famous by the notorious Total Information Awareness project.

Today, we learn why everyone's calls had to be in the target set. The NSA wasn't just conducting social network analysis. It was using a more controversial data mining technique, made famous by Darpa's Total Information Awareness project, which focuses on prediction, not connections.

Under this approach, sophisticated algorithms hunt for patterns of terrorist behavior in information-trails, and then apply those patterns to average citizens, seeing which ones fit. It doesn't matter who you know. It's what you do that gets you in trouble. If you spend money and buy plane tickets like Mohammed Atta did, then maybe you're a terrorist, too. Same goes for the kind, and frequency, of phone calls you make.

posted by Fergie @ 5/23/2006 10:00:00 AM