"History is a wonderful thing, if only it was true"
-Tolstoy

Thursday, January 05, 2006

More on Data Mining vs WireTaps

My opinion, Data Mining OK, wiretaps ... questionable
Like who really wants to listen in on millions of teens on their cellphones?
Matter of fact, maybe that would be "torture" ... ?

Defense Tech: NSA Spying: Two Views:

One :
"The law says 'the search does not use personal identifiers of a specific individual or does not utilize inputs that appear on their face to identify or be associated with a specified individual to acquire information,' I take it to mean the new computer-based data mining isn't looking for an individual per se, it is looking at information about all individuals (at least all who make international telephone calls or send e-mails overseas or travel to foreign countries according to the government) to select individuals who may be worthy of a closer look."

Another:
"As best I can tell, the NSA program was not actually recording domestic Internet traffic, putting it in a database, and then 'mining' it for key words and the like," he writes. Instead, what went on is packet-sniffing -- "installing a monitoring device on a steam of traffic that looks for specific sequences of letters, numbers, or symbols... [like] phone numbers and e-mail accounts... For those with criminal law experience, this was basically a large-scale pen regsister/trap-and-trace or wiretap, depending on how the filters are configured."

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