Management consultant Valdis Krebs used newspaper clippings to build a visual and mathematical picture of the September 11 terrorists' social network.
(Credit: Orgnet.com)
Unnamed intelligence agencies and certain academics have yet to give up on data mining to identify terrorists and predict attacks, despite a 352-page tome published last year pronouncing the practice a waste of time.
The U.S. is spending "hundreds of millions of dollars" to develop techniques to mine the mountains of information gleaned from e-mails, telephone calls, interviews with suspects, and now social networks to build-up Facebook-style databanks on international terrorists, according to a recent piece in the British newspaper, The Independent.
The result has been the arrest and interrogation of "many thousands of innocent people" in Iraq and Afghanistan in the hope of extracting any tidbits of intelligence that could be fed into computers programmed with social-network algorithms, The Independent's Steve Connor wrote, quoting unnamed critics.
More: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13639_3-10315748-42.html
