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FBI & Business Databases Data Mining Consumer Habbits
FBI & Business Databases The Chicago Tribune has an interesting article linking consumer databases with the FBI; FBI Has Eye On Business Databases. Essentially, the bureau wants to use terrorism as an excuse to tap into this mass of information, just like big companies do. Using similar data-mining algorithms, they could extract trends and mark out anomalies for expert analysis. The main reason for using data-mining lies in the ability to process much more information very quickly, at the cost of clamping down on those innocent souls that don't conform to the trends... | Alex J. Champandard 934 posts. Sunday 14 July, 12:14 Reply
Minority report "For instance, some police departments have used the technique to sift crime data for trends to predict where future crimes are most likely to occur." This sounds rather like the film I just went to see called "minority report". Whether you use "pre-cogs" or just a big cluster of supercomputers it actually amounts to the same thing. You're putting a lot of trust into the computer systems being accurate at predicting crimes and tracking individuals. And at the end of the day those of us who've worked with computers for a long time know that the simulation (or data mining algorithms) are only as good as the people who program and operate them. I can see the need for these sorts of system, particularly to combat "terrorism" (people seem to use that word to cover a lot of generally bad or just mildly antisocial things these days), but I'm not really in favour of the general "trawling" of everyone's personal records just incase they might have done something bad - treating everyone as a potential criminal. Although the technologies may be new these sorts of surveilance activity have historical precedents in the former soviet union and also in germany under the nazi regime where massive resources were put into maintaining huge archives of information about people's daily activities. A system of informants, beurocrats and secret police could then be used to weed out and "dissapear" anyone considered to be of an undesirable ethnic or political persuasion. Perhaps we are pre-destined to live in an orwellian society ruled by fear and suspicion, but like tom cruise in the "minority report" film I would prefer to believe that we have a choice. - Bob | motters 136 posts. Sunday 14 July, 16:33 Reply