[ExI] Feel Safer Now?

[Gary Miller]

Amara Graps ha scritto:
> The news at Boing Boing today that the US federal government thinks 
> that
> 1 in 300 US residents are terrorists:
> 
> http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/13/1-in-300-us-resident.html
> 
> "September 2007 report by the Inspector General of the Department of 
> Justice, which reported that the Terrorist Screening Center had over 
> 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007, and that the list was 
> growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month.As of today, 
> the list stands at approximately 917,000 names."
> 

I think the folks at Boing Boing are jumping to conclusions.

Just because your name comes up on a watch list does not make you a terrorist.

The Department of Homeland security is using data mining techniques to identify persons of interest.

So lets say that there are 1000 real terrorists identified in the country today from solid sources like Alquida documents captured in Iraq raids.

By monitoring the phone records of the people they call and the people that call them the list gets much bigger.

Obviously not all those people they call or who call them are terrorists.

But if a person who calls them then calls three other people who are also on the list of known terrorists then the probability that they are involved in a terror cell increases dramatically.

Cross reference these lists with the list of people who have overstayed after Visa expiration and you now have the means 
of locating and deporting potential unfriendlies who have already violated our laws by not complying with the terms of their being here.

Obviously homeland security does not have enough resources to monitor 700,000 people who come up on call lists but I am sure there is a weighting algorithm where by the more times you call a terrorist and the more terrorists you call the higher their level of interest in you becomes.

So what if we're all on this list and they have Carnivore monitoring our voice and data.  As long as we are not consorting with known terrorists, talking consistently about bombs, Jihad, drugs (Narcoterrorism), Bin Ladin, etc... Then the Men in Black will never show up at our door.

If this type or surveillance helps identify terror cells, sleeper cells, white supremacist arm stockpiles, etc...
and a minimum of innocent civilians don't get their doors busted down by mistake then I think this is a good thing.
It shows that the government is trying to use the same data mining software that businesses use to be more effective and make us safer.