NP: Pearl Jam, Pearl Jam

Great op-ed piece in today's New York Times on the efficacy of the NSA phone record analysis. On guilt by association:

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.

Everybody together: And this is an argument against the methodology?

I've got a quibble with this bit:

A second problem with the spy agency's apparent methodology lies in the way terrorist groups operate and what scientists call the "strength of weak ties." As the military scientist Robert Spulak has described it to me, you might not see your college roommate for 10 years, but if he were to call you up and ask to stay in your apartment, you'd let him. This is the principle under which sleeper cells operate: there is no communication for years. Thus for the most dangerous threats, the links between nodes that the agency is looking for simply might not exist.

That's not saying that looking at points of contact won't work, it's just saying that you're looking for a different pattern than frequency of contact. Good data mining, after all, uncovers non-intuitive, more latent relationships between entities.

And speaking of abstract pattern recognition, here's a transcript of an interview with the guy who, literally, wrote the book on it.