Good For Only One Thing

by digby

The Republicans (and some Democrats) have made a fetish of describing the warrantless surveillance programs as necessary to catch terrorists before they hit. They can’t tell us anything about what these programs actually do — it’s quite clear there is more to it than “listening in on the phone calls of terrorists.” One of the things that most people agree upon is that it includes some sort of datamining and I suspect that when this is explained to some of these congressmen and Senators, their eyes glaze over in the same way they do when anybody talks about the intertubes. They are, to be kind, very easily hoodwinked with technobabble.

But what if it were determined that the entire premise was flawed?

One of the fundamental underpinnings of predictive data mining in the commercial sector is the use of training patterns. Corporations that study consumer behavior have millions of patterns that they can draw upon to profile their typical or ideal consumer. Even when data mining is used to seek out instances of identity and credit card fraud, this relies on models constructed using many thousands of known examples of fraud per year.

Terrorism has no similar indicia. With a relatively small number of attempts every year and only one or two major terrorist incidents every few years—each one distinct in terms of planning and execution—there are no meaningful patterns that show what behavior indicates planning or preparation for terrorism.

[…] Without patterns to use, one fallback for terrorism data mining is the idea that any anomaly may provide the basis for investigation of terrorism planning. Given a “typical” American pattern of Internet use, phone calling, doctor visits, purchases, travel, reading, and so on, perhaps all outliers merit some level of investigation. This theory is offensive to traditional American freedom, because in the United States everyone can and should be an “outlier” in some sense. More concretely, though, using data mining in this way could be worse than searching at random; terrorists could defeat it by acting as normally as possible.

Treating “anomalous” behavior as suspicious may appear scientific, but, without patterns to look for, the design of a search algorithm based on anomaly is no more likely to turn up terrorists than twisting the end of a kaleidoscope is likely to draw an image of the Mona Lisa.

Tim F. At Balloon Juice points out the political implications:

As the civil liberty debate rages, even our extreme authoritarians couch their arguments in terms of benefit relative to cost. If the benefit doesn’t exist then wannabe autocrats like Newt Gingrich plainly have no leg to stand on. The only remaining support would have to come from these programs’ side benefits, primarily the existence of a detailed dossier on the personal life of every American citizen. That should come in handy in case any priest becomes, as one departed ruler might put it, a bit turbulent.*

This is an authoritarian dream come true. Here they have the means to root out anyone who steps outside the norm, who doesn’t conform to mainstream standards of behavior. Someone, perhaps, like this dirty hippie who was a bit of a flake and worked on strange machinery in his garage. (Pssst. He’s half Syrian, too.)

The right invented the term useful idiot to describe those who were being used and manipulated by the commies. They are today behaving as useful idiots for the Islamo-fascists” they profess to hate. If you really wanted to destroy America you wouldn’t stop at trashing the constitution or taunt them into useless wars. You’d also hope that the nation would shut down the iconoclastic individuals who tend to be artists and entrepreneurs and “outliers” as the article suggests. That could eventually destroy the vibrancy of the culture and the dynamism of its economy. These religious extremists think in terms of centuries and I’m sure they are quite pleased with the pace of their project so far.

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