Originally Posted by
Dan Fromm
I first became aware that the secret police were collecting large volumes of telephone company message records in late September, 2001. This from close reading of a story in the Times, not from discussions with colleagues I believe were assisting the secret police. I have a little experience with AT&T long distance, local, and cellular message records, also a little experience with building targeting models. I long ago concluded that the secret police are having us on and are hiding the fact that they're lying to us behind claims of secrecy. They can't possibly have a large enough training sample (containing known bad guys) to build a good model that uses message records to identify bad guys. And a good model that purports to find extremely rare bad guys using message records will (a) fail to find many of them and (b) will generate unmanageably large numbers of false positives. It is indeed possible that the secret police have other data no one's talking about and that they're not boasting about having that will improve their ability to find bad guys before they misbehave, but given bad guys rarity its hard to believe that a targeting model will do the job. Good old fashioned police work, yes. Number magic performed by very bright computer scientists and statisticians, no.
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