NSA Shopping For Data Mining Tech 159
prostoalex writes "The National Security Agency paid a visit to Silicon Valley venture capitalists, the New York Times learned, to talk about potentially 'interesting' technologies that the Feds would be interested in purchasing. Data mining technologies that could link arbitrary facts into logical events and find dependencies, technologies for quick voice transcription - all these technologies usually get to market faster if developed by private companies."
Open source community (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Open source community (Score:4, Insightful)
These systems are extremely specialised and targetted at law enforcement and/or large corporations with huge databases.
Seccessful OSS projects tend to be the ones that are used by the people writing them, and are of use to a wide community. If the developers do not have a vested interest in the product, then development will tend to stagnate.
I think it is hard to argue that OSS has been successful in making products that are targetted at such specific (and wealthy) groups.
Re:Open source community (Score:2)
Re:Open source community (Score:1)
Most of the technology to do this already exists as Open Source projects. If I were starting it up now, I would probably try to combine an Open Source JBI
Re:Open source community (Score:1, Informative)
Well, some of the best of those commercial systems are based on OSS work. For example, Netezza, one of the best commercial business-intel & data mining platforms today was based on postgresql [netezza.com]
Re:Open source community (Score:2)
Databases are an area that OSS tends to excel at, as are operating systems. I doubt all of the systems they'd be considering would be built around Oracle for Windows.
Re:Open source community (Score:2)
OSS excels at providing "core systems" that many people want to use to build their own systems on top of. Everyone contributes a little to the core system (so everyone wins there) and then puts the rest of their work into application-specific stuff.
Re:Open source community (Score:2)
While what you say is tru
Re:Open source community (Score:2)
Any computerised technique that does not rely on personal expertise for qualitative management will just flood with useless information and become a burden rath
Re:Open source community (Score:2)
Re:Open source community (Score:1)
This time, though, I don't think they want anyone knowing exactly how their mining code works, lest someone figure out a way to wreak havoc on the system. For example, the idea of someone making records invisible to the data miner probably has them spooked (I know, code it well and this'll never happen, but you can "never be too careful"). Just my two cents.
Re:Open source community (Score:2)
High Tech Ntional Security (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:High Tech Ntional Security (Score:4, Insightful)
Cause spammers and advertisers only spam you, government can use the data to imprison or even shoot you. The fact remains that a tool like this is readymade for a dictatorship that isn't even recognizable as one from the outside. Perfect to oppress people, anathema to a democracy
Re:High Tech Ntional Security (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:High Tech Ntional Security (Score:2)
Offtopic, I know, but I feel the discussions here could be much more productive (with much less FUD) if people understood logic a little better.
Re:High Tech Ntional Security (Score:1)
Re:High Tech Ntional Security (Score:1)
Re:High Tech Ntional Security (Score:1)
But seriously, even if a tenth of the stuff I hear about what is going on over there is true, it is about time to resurect the Weather Report.
Re:High Tech Ntional Security (Score:2)
The government doesn't belong having absolute knowledge of our private lives, because then the burden to be law-abiding becomes infinite. The temptation to miscontrue "illegal" patterns becomes too great for abusers to resist: Even if the courts do get involved (and discern every case correctly) then the powerful still have a tool for limitless harassment of opposition groups and
Re:High Tech Ntional Security (Score:2)
The government can't imprison you unless you are committing crime, that's why we have judges.
Guantanamo Bay!
Re:High Tech Ntional Security (Score:1)
treaties?
we 'won' the war in afghanistan, at least thats what the guberment said, so why are there still pow?
Just like other weapons? (Score:2)
You can apply that same principle to tanks or fighter planes. And it would be just as invalid. Possesion of these tools, whether they be bombs or data mining software, does not make the government a tyranny. How and WHY they're used will determine that. You can't deny the nation the use of them, nor automatically label the government despotic by the mere posession of them. National Security is a legitimate function of any government. What is both ironic, and
Re:High Tech Ntional Security (Score:2)
Because it's the government, and we have a Constitution.
Re:High Tech Ntional Security (Score:1)
Re:High Tech Ntional Security (Score:2)
Re:High Tech Ntional Security (Score:2)
The parent of this post has the whole point. Lock, Stock and barrel head. The NSA is tracking across the US Constitution and the people doing so at the NSA should be sent to trial under the rules we Americans tried Japanese and German War criminals at the end of WW2. The penalty should be the same as well. They should be hanged!
Don't worry guys(At NSA et. al.) you have nothing to fear unless the citizens start coming for you.
Re:High Tech Ntional Security (Score:2)
Proposed/Actual Useage (Score:2)
Technician Strike (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm hearing more and more about the idea of a national strike.
We technicians bitch and complain about this kind of flagrant privacy violation.
It would be much more difficult for these people, I'd think, if there were some sort of technician union that had technical rights as well as civil rights as part of its platform.
It's real simple:
1) Don't help these fucks in any way.
2) Harm them in any way you can get away with. Small needling, over and over again. Refusal to cooperate. Take their money and do nothing.
Re:Technician Strike (Score:2)
* IT is far too market driven to support a union. If tech people went on strike, then they'd just pay someone else to do it. When so much work is ultimately contract based, we need to delver products, or our jobs get taken by someone willing to delver (maybe not directly).
* It's illegal in most countries to be destructive. The Fire Fighter union cannot hold a strike where they go around lighting fires. Furthe
Why? (Score:3, Interesting)
But I used to. I used to march lockstep with my fellow Marines, wanting only a chance to use my rifle, or its bayonet, on some terrorist bent on destroying all I hold dear.
I value my privacy, too. But there's a difference between what I do in private (or even a semi-public area like a res
Re:Why? (Score:1)
The difference is, when I am in the mall and I start shouting about Holomorphic Aliens (or whatever) while wearing tinfoil helmet (sorry, obl.) I can see everyone staring at me. I can watch the policeman come up and ask me to leave. I know when I am making public records because I have to physically interact with someone or something in order for that record to be made.
On the internet, the lines between private and public become very hazy, and it's all too easy
Re:Why? (Score:1)
Re:Why? (Score:1)
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Re:Why? (Score:1)
Re:Why? (Score:1)
Re:Why? (Score:1)
Troll troll troll your post
Gently down the screen
Merrily merrily merrily merrily
Life is but a stream
It's all about transparency. Which is even harder to maintain if parts of the process are no longer tangible, in plain si
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Well, I was with you up to those last 4 words. I guess you're note "lockstop" on minor issues like Speech, eh?
Why are you really so afraid of the idea of organized resistence to the (Totalitarian) Regime that currently controls the US? AFter all, you can just shoot the protestestors, right? It's not as though they have any right to participate in the determination of how their government acts, right? Hell,
Re:Why? (Score:1)
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Re:Why? (Score:2)
You didn't mention Dubya's spiritual progenitor: Adolf Hitler was also democraticly elected.
Re:Why? (Score:2)
If you think he is incorrect you should be able to challenge his beliefs without resorting to ad hominem attacks. He's only voicing his opinion. If that's bullying then I have a pot and a kettle I want to show you.
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Dumbass - there's a differnce between simply "that's dumb" and telling someone they should "be quiet" - I have no problem arguing with him "ad hominem" or otherwise - he's the one who took the position of demand that others not respond. You should go back and read the thread.
Furthermore, I
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Furthermore, I believe I stated that I agreed with what he was saying right up to the point where he demanded that others not challenge his opinion. I can only hope he learned more from the exchange than you obviously did. Unless I mi
Re:Why? (Score:2)
*sigh* *idly twirls ENORMOUS e-penis*
Well, it's mostly a matter of language, which I think is fairly well defined elsewhere so I won't go into it here...
So you want to go to your interpretation of what he said and what you think it means about him? Funny, that's pretty
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Look to the oval office for the conspirators, then.
From this report: [forbes.com] "At least 2,289 service members have died since the war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count."
See also this page, [iraqbodycount.net] which shows that the estimated Iraqi body count is 10 time
Liberty != Safety. (Score:1)
Ignoring the other issues present, let me make a clarification:
The government isn't defending your "liberty" when they catch such a person. They're defending your safety. Important difference. Not that your safety isn't important. It is.
But these sorts of programs infringe upon the liberty of the guilty by infringing upon the liberty of everyone . That's how they work. It's like a tuna net. If you want tuna caught that's fine,
Re:Why? (Score:2)
If you are a 'true patriot', like you seem to be implying by mentioning the fact that you're a US marine, you would know that grand-parents right to express his opinion, any opinion, is bigger than any other right you have. His right to call for even the overthrow of governement, however much you may object, is bigger than your (perceived) right to safety. And what's more, you've sworn an oath to defend to death his right to do so.
Funnily, you yourself said exactly this in the first line of your post so, th
Re:Why? (Score:2)
I wasn't talking about his right to his opinion in general. I was just talking about that particular expression of it, which I found ludicrous. He has a right to talk, and I have a right to tell him to shut up. He doesn't have to listen.
Re:Why? (Score:2)
I think you better start learning on what 'freedom of speech/expression' truly means because you certainly aren't 'getting it', yet. Good luck with that, too.
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Nothing the State does could possibly be wrong in his eyes. He has no idea what liberty really is; he's never read any of the writing of the thinkers who framed our constitution and who informed the views of the Founding Fathers, and if it were up to him, he'd throw all those people in Gitmo.
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Ad hominem attacks are, however, not the way to point out the fallacies in other peoples arguments. At least not if you truly want to convince them that they just might be wrong. If he really believes in what he says that puts him at least one step ahead of you in a debate.
Perhaps you're right and nothing will change how he feels about it. I still had to try because if I hadn't, I would be
Re:Technician Strike (Score:2)
And as for #2, I think that taking their money (i.e. getting a contract) and not giving them anything, just *might* be a breach of contract. Might want to rethink that second bit.
Re:Technician Strike (Score:1)
Re:Technician Strike (Score:2)
Let them know where you live, and let them enter that into the program.
If they find anything out about any terrorist activity in your area, they can rig the software to ignore it, as per your wishes.
Re:Technician Strike (Score:2)
Polls show that, if the question is put in a certain way, it's not hard to get a very large majority of people to support surveillance, even very "
Re:Technician Strike (Score:2)
America is in the process of devolving into a police state. With every passing week their grip on the government grows.
Oh, and I'm dead serious.
Re:Technician Strike (Score:2)
Re:Technician Strike (Score:2)
You have your priorities terribly wrong.
"Give me liberty or give me death."
Re:Technician Strike (Score:2)
Re:Seditious talk, my man... watch out (Score:2)
You imply that you are "in a time of war" at present. Hmmm. Leaving that aside, do you think that "it's not wise to talk about striking" is a good thing, or a bad thing?
Human intel (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Human intel (Score:2)
Re:Human intel (Score:2)
What about Katrina? Sure to be modded flamebait, but I got your attention, so I'll use it. There are more important and immediate problems in this world where the situation can be improved by foresightedness, intelligence, compassion, kindness, frugality, etc. Improving the general state of our society is not something you agree while watching the olympics. You invest of yourself, your time, your passion to be a par
Computers are unreliable, but humans are more so. (Score:2)
Unfortunately, getting quality human intel isn't simple, and there can be problems with overvaling it [thenation.com], too. There are problems when you start only looking for evidence supporting what you expect to find.
Tech-based intel is too limited in coverage; humans go places machines don't. Human intel has low accuracy; machines don't lie for their own benefit (yet). You need a mix of both.
Re:Human intel (Score:1)
This search I hope is just a stop-gap measure until the human intel can be rebuild. You are talking sometimes in the order of double-digit years to repair such problems. Human intel just does not happer over night. It must be cultivated which takes time.
I can give them that (Score:2)
arbitrary:
adjective: based on or subject to individual discretion or preference or sometimes impulse or caprice
fact
noun 1 a thing that is indisputably the case
So an arbitrary fact would be something that is indisputably the case based on individual impulse of caprice.
I write code like that after I smoke a phat dubbie but I didn't know the NSA would be interested in paying a big buck for it. I'
Re:I can give them that (Score:2, Interesting)
Determined by chance, whim, or impulse, and not by necessity, reason, or principle: stopped at the first motel we passed, an arbitrary choice.
"Abitrary facts" within its context could also mean "a set of facts chosen from a larger set of facts at random".
I think "seemingly unrelated facts" is what they really meant to say.
Re:I can give them that (Score:1)
Relax (Score:1)
Re:Relax (Score:1)
Re:Relax (Score:1)
As a bonus those billions of taxpayer dollars and consultant jobs will help bolster their reports that the job market isn't dying. Plenty of jobs will be created to shuffle the data, thousands will be created administering the clusters and servers holding the data, hundreds will be created adminis
NSA is very sharp (Score:3, Interesting)
The NSA is made up of very smart and capable folks. Give them a budget and incentives, and they can probably do a pretty good job of sticking their noses into the public's affairs.
Sadly for our privacy, the US has no real concept of data privacy. If you've bought something and told someone, they can tell the NSA.
So if the data is available, the NSA can just go out and but it. That's perfectly fine, but it means the NSA can easily acquire mind-bogglingly large amounts of data. Also, the phone company (AT&T) has no qualms cooperating with the govt. It isn't like Google, willing to fight it out in court. Just about nobody is -- so the NSA has an easy time, if it wants to get the goods on you.
Re:High IQ Doesn't Indicate Competence or Credibil (Score:2)
Time for a reality check (Score:1)
But after 10 years' worth of liscensing, ultimately cost the economy more.
A few principles for thinking about corruption: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A few principles for thinking about corruption: (Score:2)
Re:A few principles for thinking about corruption: (Score:2)
Cheney changed the law, allowing no-bid contracts. (Score:2)
When Cheney was Secretary of Defense [rotten.com], he changed the rules, allowing no-bid contracts in some cases. Now that Cheney is vice-president, his former company got a huge no-bid contract, in secret. This contract was partly to provide oilfield services. The attraction of oil and weapons for corrupters is that there is so much money involved, and many contracts.
There are too many other examples for a Slashdot comment. Note that
Re:Please elaborate on point 7: Enron (Score:2)
Re:Please elaborate on point 7: Enron (Score:2)
Wrong. I was living in California during this time and even though things started to get bad while Clinton was just about to leave office, they got much worse and stayed worse after Bush became president. It is not called the "2000 California Energy Crisis" but rather the "2000 -- 2001 California Energy Crisis".
A simple Google(California Enron) [google.com] will get you lots of information, almost all of which contradicts your statement. Sim
Common Slashdot trick, with several steps: (Score:2)
1) Pretend that a Slashdot comment is an exhaustively researched 500-page book that discusses all sides of an issue.
2) Find something that isn't explained in the Slashdot comment.
3) Assume that the Slashdot comment represents all that the comment poster knows.
4) Claim that it is a tragedy that the poster of the Slashdot comment could be so stupid.
Answer to the issue you raised: The proper time to deal with Hitler
Link: Halliburton Subsidiary Gets Contract... (Score:2)
Paranoia (Score:1)
Doesn't this sound like a paranoid?
Re:Paranoia (Score:1)
It's really nothing terribly new. Banks and credit agencies have been using similar technology for years (albeit simpler than what they can do now).
These systems don't really understand the concept of "logical event"; they just find correlations between pieces of data, and clusters of "data points".
"Psychosis" would be more accurate (Score:2)
Hooray for Google and Yahoo! (Score:1, Redundant)
American companies can now stop working for repressive foreign governments.
No Privacy (Score:1, Redundant)
We already know what George Bu
Data mining requires DATA (Score:1)
Dont mind me, but doesnt data mining require data? Dont these bad guys use snail mail, secret meetings & public payphones etc? Data mining and monitoring of electronic communications is only effective when the enemy e-mail or otherwise use electronic means of communication - the Brits have been mining all Internet data too and from the UK for a few years, but were still subject to an attack.
While voice calls are routed through an underground massive network of computers looking for key-words,
Re:Data mining requires DATA (Score:1)
In one demo of this technology a while back, they were able to input a fragment of a license plate number, a partial description and a few other items, and, in the space of a few seconds, search a gigantic database and come up with not only the full files on the person involved, but all friends, relatives and people that person had been in contact with for years previou
Haha! (Score:1)
At my last performance evaluation, at a non-profit federal military contractor, my manager was attempting to explain to me why my job sucks so much and why he couldn't do anything about it. At the end, though, he said,"You see that 30 acre construction project we're building across the stre
Fund the C-Prize (Score:1, Offtopic)
They could fund a prize competition such as the following [geocities.com]:
Let anyone submit an open source program that produces, with no inputs, one of the major natural language corpora as output.
S = size of uncompressed corpus
P = size of program outputting the uncompressed corpus
R = S/P (the compression ratio).
Award monies in a manner similar to the M-Prize [mprize.org]:
Previous record rati
Are, there you are :-) (Score:2)
This means that the usual methods of compression that favor blocks and limited dictionaries(or Huffman buffers or whatever) are not those to look at, because the only input files (corpus) that represent what is sensible are the complete body of accessible human works. It is interesting that this body is not s
That's the beauty of a C-Prize metric (Score:2)
Re-ordering the corpus prior to compression is fine so long as it is reversible. That means the ordering information must cost less than the gain in compression by reordering.
A classic example is the bzip algorithm. Beautiful.
This suprise the poster? (Score:2)
Is it safe? (Score:2)
Re:Real hit versus bogus hit... (Score:1)
The Cheneyacs want war to stop buying cds and ripping them. Of course now that consoles are going to have more services like this, and it is an effort where I live in homes heated by oil.
Somewhat pedantic, but homes in a melee fighting for land and control management would be a shame that it'll be destroyed in a country (aside from the other. F
Re:Cash and the written word (Score:2)
Use medium denomination unmarked nonsequential bills while having an unmemorable appearance, and remember your history [pbs.org].
HTH. HAND.