Rattle wrote:
The bulk of this article is about Steve Jobs, Pixar, and Disney. When followed up with this, its and odd mix:
"Traffic analysis, at the NSA? I'm tempted to be sarcastic, but I won't be. As you might know, I started a company a few years ago with a former NSA guy -- somebody who was a cryptographer and Russian linguist on those submarines that snuck into Soviet harbors to tap their phone lines -- and we applied traffic analysis to Internet discussion groups to identify opinion leaders, conversation trends and so forth. We used a lot of techniques that were developed or applied to law enforcement. And we didn't use anything that violated anybody's security clearances... really!
"(My company) was acquired by a business intelligence company funded by the CIA venture capital outfit. Apparently the stuff I invented is now in the hands of a couple of intelligence agencies, including Homeland Security.
"I'll tell you what I think the most troubling thing about all this is. It's easy to see whatever pattern you're looking for. It's like curve fitting in the stock market -- looks beautiful historically and maybe even in the short run, but it's a disaster in the making. So we have these guys running the country who saw a non-existent pattern in Iraq that justified a war ... and now we're going to give them software that will make it easy to create the illusion of patterns of conspiracy.
"Your friend from the NSA was right, but it's worse than he suggests. It's not just that social network analysis casts a wide net. It's that without oversight by people who really grasp the mathematics and have some distance from the whole thing, they're going to see patterns where there aren't any.
Its only truly useful if you can directly engage the people involved in the discussions being monitored. There is the model of watching and the model of interaction. Ideas evolve and are tested through dialog. The strength, rigidness, and degree of development of ideas is only truly tested when they are put to the test. Hence, when viewing something being monitored, you don't know if its people blowing steam, or if you have encountered a developed ideology of any strength. All these things can be effected and steered. The traditional intelligence agencies seem to have had trouble doing that without having it backfire.
Hrm.. Who do we know who has been working on that kinda stuff? Where do I apply to be the Steve Jobs of public focused open source intelligence tools? Is that position open? I'm not a sociopath either...
In the private sector, Live World does this sort of metrics analysis and interaction for its clients.
