No transparent political agenda here, nope, nope, nope.
As a conservative, I'm surprised you're not concerned about privacy. I would think that would be one of the considerations that would cross such political lines; I certainly am not interested in government officials whose laptops regularly seem to go wandering off somewhere having my personal details on them when they do, for starters.
And then there's the whole issue of whether there's any sense behind using falafel-hunting data-mining. Sure, data mining is a good tool; but it's not a cure-all. It's a highly specific tool, and it's also extremely expensive. I question the good judgment of anyone using it on grocery-store records; GIGO applies here. And considering the number of various sorts of dishonesty the FBI has been caught at, particularly in counter-intel programs, I have to chuckle when I hear someone saying it's not so because some FBI mouthpiece said so. Finally, it's exactly the type of thing some lawyer who's a computer science naif would dream up; you would have to work in the industry to see how much stupid **** like this I encounter every day of my life. It appears the naifs aren't confined to the private sector, which having done some support of government programs being run on web sites is no surprise at all to me. I believe the standard military expression begins with the word "cluster."
It might work for traffic analysis, but then again, it might not; depends on whether you've got anything to go along with it. Ultimately, you have to get feet on the ground, poke around and ask questions. That's how you find out what's going on, and that's precisely what these folks aren't doing. So if they're trying to replace that with data-mining, then we've got an inferior or at least incomplete technique that's much more expensive being used to replace something cheap and effective. Your tax dollars at work. Neato. I'm surprised, again, that a conservative thinks throwing money at something is a good way to fix it.
As to the 41 page report, I found that of interest, thanks.
DR
Glad you did. Hope the TLA-designated government agencies beg, borrow, or steal enough of vestiges of enough clues to do so as well.
