Taking Spying to Higher Level, Agencies Look for More Ways to Mine Data(The News York Times)

John Markoffの力作。「テロをデータ・マイニングで未然に防ぐ」話題を取り上げている。

Mr. Arquilla, who was a consultant on Admiral Poindexter's Total Information Awareness project, said that the $40 billion spent each year by intelligence agencies had failed to exploit the power of data mining in correlating information readily available from public sources, like monitoring Internet chat rooms used by Al Qaeda. Instead, he said, the government has been investing huge sums in surveillance of phone calls of American citizens.

こうしたお金が技術の進展には必要なのは重々承知だが，これでいいのか。

He was alluding to databases maintained at an AT&T data center in Kansas, which now contain electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls, going back decades. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group, has asserted in a lawsuit that the AT&T Daytona system, a giant storehouse of calling records and Internet message routing information, was the foundation of the N.S.A.'s effort to mine telephone records without a warrant.

すごい話だな。