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Tuesday, May 16, 2006

It was never INTENDED to detect terrorist networks!
Posted by Jill | 7:12 AM
The NSA spying program is so clearly a case of fishnetting and so obviously a means for this highly-secretive administration to keep an eye on those who might expose its crimes that I'm amazed anyone actually takes it seriously as a national security mechanism.

And more expert voices than mine on the subject are speaking out as well:

If the program is along the lines described by USA Today — with the security agency receiving complete lists of who called whom from each of the phone companies — the object is probably to collect data and draw a chart, with dots or "nodes" representing individuals and lines between nodes if one person has called another.

Mathematicians who work with pictures like this are called graph theorists, and there is an entire academic field, social network analysis, that tries to determine information about a group from such a chart, like who the key players are or who the cell leaders might be.

But without additional data, its reach is limited: as any mathematician will admit, even when you know everyone in the graph is a terrorist, it doesn't directly portray information about the order or hierarchy of the cell. Social network researchers look instead for graph features like "centrality": they try to identify nodes that are connected to a lot of other nodes, like spokes around the hub of a bicycle wheel.

But this isn't as helpful as you might imagine. First, the "central player" — the person with the most spokes — might not be as important as the hub metaphor suggests. For example, Jafar Adibi, an information scientist at the University of Southern California, analyzed e-mail traffic among Enron employees before the company collapsed. He found that if you naïvely analyzed the resulting graph, you could conclude that one of the "central" players was Ken Lay's ... secretary.

And even if you manage to eliminate all the "central players," you may well still leave enough lesser players that the cell retains a complete chain of command capable of carrying out a devastating terrorist attack.

In addition, the National Security Agency's entire spying program seems to be based on a false assumption: that you can work out who might be a terrorist based on calling patterns. While I agree that anyone calling 1-800-ALQAEDA is probably a terrorist, in less obvious situations guilt by association is not just bad law, it's bad mathematics, for two reasons.

The simplest reason is that we're all connected. Not in the Haight-Ashbury/Timothy Leary/late-period Beatles kind of way, but in the sense of the Kevin Bacon game. The sociologist Stanley Milgram made this clear in the 1960's when he took pairs of people unknown to each other, separated by a continent, and asked one of the pair to send a package to the other — but only by passing the package to a person he knew, who could then send the package only to someone he knew, and so on. On average, it took only six mailings — the famous six degrees of separation — for the package to reach its intended destination.

Looked at this way, President Bush is only a few steps away from Osama bin Laden (in the 1970's he ran a company partly financed by the American representative for one of the Qaeda leader's brothers). And terrorist hermits like the Unabomber are connected to only a very few people. So much for finding the guilty by association.
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