Breakfast and DataMining

One of the most interesting people I met (again) at PCForum was Mr.
Jeff Jonas

"A collection of thoughts and resources on privacy and the information age, injected with a few personal stories."

He'd joined me at breakfast on Tuesday.

After a few comments on having sold his company to IBM, it all clicked.
(this is one of the reasons I value attendance at PCForum ... serendipitous meetings)

Jeff had spoken about 3yrs ago, topic of data-mining.

Excerpt :
"Data mining means different things to different people and quite frankly has become an overused term. And after having seen quite a few data mining definitions, I have concluded the longer the definition the greater the confusion. So what might be the shortest possible definition?

Data Mining = Prediction.

and

When a government is faced with an overwhelming number of predicates (i.e., subjects of investigative interest), data mining can be quite useful for triaging (prioritizing) which subjects should be pursued first. One example: the hundreds of thousands of people currently in the United States with expired visas. The student studying virology from Saudi Arabia holding an expired visa might be more interesting than the holder of an expired work visa from Japan writing game software.

Applying this line of thinking to the recently reported NSA warrantless surveillance debate, if the surveillance always starts with a predicate (in this setting, phone calls from known Al Qaeda training camps), and then data mining is used for predicate triage … then we are talking about a very useful form of data mining."

My comment - nobody wants to listen to 10MM teens on their cellphones just after school.

Targeted data-mining is useful.

Of note: Jeff got some "fame" for this:
Wired 14.03: Posts: "What Happens in Vegas... "