The Department of Homeland Security is using all kinds of computer tools to do data mining and they are gathering the data from businesses and government records, where ever they can find them. Many decry these methods but all the information that the government has on each individual citizen is information that they do indeed own. When you do business with a certain company chances are of the information you give them is theirs to give out to whoever they choose, based on their privacy policy, which you submit to.
Some people believe that Department of Homeland Security has stopped collecting data and that is not true. Yes, some personal identity information, they are not allowed to seek without a court order, but for the most part the government has the opportunity to data mine all sorts of information that is already out there in the public record, the government record or with businesses that the government does contract with.
Additionally, all the is data mining done by Department of Homeland Security, has to do with trends and commonalities. By revealing this information, they can find anomalies in the data that alert them that something is going different or unexpected. This helps them predict patterns of behavior and know when something is out of place. The Department of Homeland Security is allowed to go through chat rooms, online blogs, the Internet, personal home pages, video surveillance footage and they also scan every phone call for data.
Why are they doing this? They are doing this to find data that jumps out at them and signals that something is going wrong. With the help of mathematicians, linguists, artificial intelligence and logicians is amazing what they can come up with. Is the government reading your blog? Yes, they are reading your blog, but is not as if they are snooping, they use search engine type spiders to go through all the pages on the Internet.
What else is the software good for or how can these strategies be used better? By knowing what types of people live in a certain area, or what type of events are occurring along with the amount of chatter going on in a specific area, or with a specific group of people that are linked in some way - the Department of Homeland security can predict an international terrorist attack or a "black swan event" such as someone going berserk at a post office.
Will they actually be able to prevent and predict events in this way? Theoretically, it is possible and such technologies are getting us to a closer place where we will soon know just how good we are predicting the future. Something to definitely contemplate in 2008.
Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining---You-Have-to-Be-Smarter-Than-the-Data-and-Thats-the-Rub!&id=884014
Some people believe that Department of Homeland Security has stopped collecting data and that is not true. Yes, some personal identity information, they are not allowed to seek without a court order, but for the most part the government has the opportunity to data mine all sorts of information that is already out there in the public record, the government record or with businesses that the government does contract with.
Additionally, all the is data mining done by Department of Homeland Security, has to do with trends and commonalities. By revealing this information, they can find anomalies in the data that alert them that something is going different or unexpected. This helps them predict patterns of behavior and know when something is out of place. The Department of Homeland Security is allowed to go through chat rooms, online blogs, the Internet, personal home pages, video surveillance footage and they also scan every phone call for data.
Why are they doing this? They are doing this to find data that jumps out at them and signals that something is going wrong. With the help of mathematicians, linguists, artificial intelligence and logicians is amazing what they can come up with. Is the government reading your blog? Yes, they are reading your blog, but is not as if they are snooping, they use search engine type spiders to go through all the pages on the Internet.
What else is the software good for or how can these strategies be used better? By knowing what types of people live in a certain area, or what type of events are occurring along with the amount of chatter going on in a specific area, or with a specific group of people that are linked in some way - the Department of Homeland security can predict an international terrorist attack or a "black swan event" such as someone going berserk at a post office.
Will they actually be able to prevent and predict events in this way? Theoretically, it is possible and such technologies are getting us to a closer place where we will soon know just how good we are predicting the future. Something to definitely contemplate in 2008.
Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?Data-Mining---You-Have-to-Be-Smarter-Than-the-Data-and-Thats-the-Rub!&id=884014
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