Matt Yglesias, John Cole, and Ezra Klein have picked up the question about data mining math. If you're looking for a small enough needle in a large enough haystack, will the noise outweigh the signal?
Ezra Klein asks the question nicely:
I’m not necessarily against a program of this sort if properly executed, but why is it such high priority? Bush keeps mentioning how we needed to “connect the dots.” Only problem is, he doesn’t seem to understand the phrase. Pre 9/11, the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, the FAA, and a variety of other groups had collected isolated bits of information and surveillance that, if laid out on the same desk, would’ve laid out the 9/11 plot in considerable detail. We had FBI officials noticing the Al-Qaeda members in flight school, NSA intercepts calling 9/11 “zero day,” agents theorizing that hijacked planes would be turned to missiles, and so forth. But none of that mattered. Because while we had the dots, we lacked the ability to connect them.
At best, this NSA program collects tons more dots, but are we connecting them? Do we have the ability to process this much information? Or are we dangerously decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio? In short, why is this program necessary? We had the intelligence under the old protocols, we just didn’t process it. Why is the answer more data and why should we be confident that the government has the resources to sift through it?Posted by alevin at December 26, 2005 09:54 PM | TrackBack
This stuff's all around, unfortunately - a weird combination of enthusiasm for the technology which allows us to crunch Big Numbers and lack of understanding (or curiosity) of how Big Numbers work. I wrote about it here
http://phenomenologic.blogspot.com/2005/11/we-are-your-friends.html
in the context of British (local) government and child protection - another of those topics where cost/benefit analysis tends to go out of the window.