October 7th, 2008
Report: Data-mining for terrorists doesn't work
After years of the federal government grabbing all the data it could find, building huge collections through which to data-mine for connections that would yield leads to terrorism suspects, a 352-page study released on Tuesday by a committee of the National Research Council warned that such goals “will be extremely difficult to achieve” because of legal, technological and logistical problems, The New York Times reports.
There is little evidence to confirm that the techniques work to actually find terrorists, despite the growing use in the last seven years, committee members said. Part of the problem, they said, is that the sample of known terrorists and actual attacks is so small that it is difficult to establish patterns of suspicious behavior.
What has NSA and DHS found through all this data? False positives and ruined lives.
“More data does not mean better data,” said William J. Perry, a former defense secretary and co-chairman of the panel.
