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I have actually been wanting to do something very similar to what you propose for a long time. Not as an effective measure or anything, but specifically to sho

I have actually been wanting to do something very similar to what you propose for a long time. Not as an effective measure or anything, but specifically to show people how such technology CAN be used. My specific idea would be to take news stories and other data around each member of Congress, and train a system to predict how likely each member of Congress is to be cheating on their spouse. I got this idea when everyone responded to the revelations about the NSA spying on everyone in an extremely specific way 100% of the time. Everyone focused on human analysts reading the text or listening to the audio of conversations. Read literally any article you find where the NSA, Obama, others in the government, absolutely anyone talks about the things the NSA has done and how they practices might be altered. In every single case, they talk solely about human analysts reading things directly. They never once talk about automated systems analyzing communications and inferring behavior profiles, using those inferred profiles to make decisions or target investigations, nothing like that. And that's where essentially all of the actual danger lies as far as I'm concerned. So perhaps if a website popped up rating each Congressperson on how likely it is they are cheating on their spouse determined by a neural net (or hell even a Bayesian filter, it doesn't actually need to be accurate at all), maybe we could actually get someone to talk about the issue. Because as it is, no one ever has or is willing to as far as I have seen. I don't know if it's because the politicians aren't aware of what such systems can do, or if they've been tricked into thinking they can actually be effective (they can't) so they intentionally try to misdirect people to concentrating on "they'll stop listening in on your phone calls" or what. The only reason I haven't built the site is that I'm unsure if there would be legal implications and if I'd end up charged with slander or something.

TheGrumpyBrit 10y ago
There's a good reason for that. The NSA don't consider data to be "collected" until it is presented to an employee or processed into a human readable form[1]. This allows them to gloss over all the data they gather in the normal, dictionary definition of the word "collect", as well as ignoring any automated analysis of that data before it's presented to a human. As far as I can tell, the NSA don't have a term to properly describe gathering and analysis of data which isn't presented to a human for analysis. [1]: https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/d5240_1_r.pdf https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/d5240_1_r.pdf (Page 15, 2.2.1)
- cryptarch 10y ago
  I'm sure it's intentional they don't have a term for that. If there's no name for it, you can't accidentally name it.
- otakucode 10y ago
  You are correct. I watched a documentary ages ago, years before Snowden, I believe back when the whistleblower had come out and told everyone about the black boxes AT&T put on their networks for the NSA, where it was mentioned that the biggest fear the NSA had was of ever having to appear in court and defend that exact definition of 'collect'. To the best of my knowledge, that definition has still not been challenged in court one way or another. So that's why the NSA parses their words very carefully, and likely Obama as well... but what about their critics in Congress?

TheGrumpyBrit 10y ago

There's a good reason for that. The NSA don't consider data to be "collected" until it is presented to an employee or processed into a human readable form[1]. This allows them to gloss over all the data they gather in the normal, dictionary definition of the word "collect", as well as ignoring any automated analysis of that data before it's presented to a human. As far as I can tell, the NSA don't have a term to properly describe gathering and analysis of data which isn't presented to a human for analysis. [1]: https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/d5240_1_r.pdf https://fas.org/irp/doddir/dod/d5240_1_r.pdf (Page 15, 2.2.1)

cryptarch 10y ago
I'm sure it's intentional they don't have a term for that. If there's no name for it, you can't accidentally name it.
otakucode 10y ago
You are correct. I watched a documentary ages ago, years before Snowden, I believe back when the whistleblower had come out and told everyone about the black boxes AT&T put on their networks for the NSA, where it was mentioned that the biggest fear the NSA had was of ever having to appear in court and defend that exact definition of 'collect'. To the best of my knowledge, that definition has still not been challenged in court one way or another. So that's why the NSA parses their words very carefully, and likely Obama as well... but what about their critics in Congress?