I swore to myself I wouldn't say anything about this...
There's been a lot of flap about NSA and the phone companies recently (USA Today) and a couple of counterarguments have emerged. These are mainly along the lines that either the whole technique is just plain goofy and produces unreliable results or there are clearly much better approaches to uncovering clandestine networks (based on message contents). See Jonathan David Farley in NY Times, and Jeff Jonas here
Still, the initial revelations that some sort of program even existed got so many people upset that you'd have to wonder if there's a non-obvious nugget we are missing. The small number of folks I've met from NSA impressed me as being high on the sharpest-knife-in-the-drawer scale and not given irrational analysis.
While links between phone numbers alone may not be of much use there are other pieces of information within phone records that could be useful. As a minimum, phone logs have directionality built into them, there's also the duration of the call and the timeframe of related calls. For example, if a call from A to B habitually causes B to immediately make a series of short calls to C/C'/C" that might be a pretty interesting pattern to be aware of. (I'm suggesting that B is acting as a "cutout"). After looking at my own phone bill for a few hours I cannot see anything of significance in this context - folks call me about as often as I call them and the calls are of widely different durations.
All I'm getting at is that with sufficient processing power it should be possible to tease quite useful intelligence out of a seemingly very large and random haystack.
Added note - The New Yorker 05.22 here
05.28 Freedom of Information hah! here
06.02 Federal judge allows lawsuit against NSA here
06.06 Can Data Mining catch Terrorists? here
06.09 Pentagon sets its sites on social networking websites here
1 comment:
What matters in your diagram is BOTH who A and B are... is A Joe Sixpack and B his local Pizza place?
Also, those connected to A and B are they interconnected? either around A and around B or around each and across both? If B is a Pizza place, it's alters[direct connections] are unlikely to be connected.
There are other questions to ask, but these first two are key to get started...
Your A to B to many Cs example looks like the calling tree for my son's soccer team when a game gets cancelled due to weather... A being the coach, B assistant coaches or volunteer parents, and the rest of the Cs being player's parents.
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