The Department of Homeland Security’s ADVISE program is under scrutiny: Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff denies his agency wants to engage in data mining. If this is true, my question would be, “why not”?
Here’s some info on ADVISE from SourceWatch:
“At ADVISE’s core, semantic graphs are used to organize the data entities and their relationships. … A semantic graph organizes relational data by using nodes to represent entities and edges to connect related entities. Hidden relationships in the data are uncovered by examining the structure and properties of the semantic graph. Privacy and support policies are enforced by a security infrastructure. Several interfaces for browsing, querying, and viewing the results of queries are under development, including IN-SPIRE and Starlight, from the DHS National Visualization and Analytics Center (NVAC). The key to fusing disparate data from many sources in ADVISE is the exploitation of ‘precomputed’ relationship information by storing the data in a semantic graph. All nodes are related by the links between them on the graph.”
Sounds like a brilliant system. I hope that the research continues and doesn’t get knocked off its rocker like Policy Analysis Market– a brilliant idea disguised as a disgusting one. The search for bad guys (real ones, like the ones who knocked our buildings down, not fake ones, like the hanged Iraqi) requires using sophisticated tools to know the knowable. If that means we know some harmless secrets about people, so be it.
The next steps is to elect and keep in office a reasonable Executive Branch that doesn’t abuse power. Not simple, I know. But keeping ourselves dumb just because someone may hurt us when we’re smart is no way to live.