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There was a great piece published back during the Patriot Act debates where a princeton or harvard professor used modern math techniques and tavern records to t
by halJordan 7mo ago
There was a great piece published back during the Patriot Act debates where a princeton or harvard professor used modern math techniques and tavern records to triangulate for arrest the early Patriots and their meeting spots. It was a great article.
- guzfip 7mo agoGot a link to this? Sounds like a fun read.
- sdoering 7mo agoNot OP, but here you go. OP had it slightly wrong though: it's not tavern records but membership lists of colonial Boston organizations, and the author is a sociology professor (Kieran Healy), not from Princeton or Harvard. He uses basic social network analysis on historical membership data to identify Paul Revere as the key figure among 254 colonists using nothing but "metadata." The whole thing is written as a satirical report by a British intelligence analyst in the 1770s, which makes it a pretty effective commentary on the "it's just metadata" argument from the NSA debates. Link: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metadata-to-find-paul-revere/ https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013/06/09/using-metad...
- ambicapter 7mo agoIsn't he also making the point that's a very effective way to triangulate the leaders of an org? That's just going to reinforce the NSA's inclination to do so.
- ethersteeds 7mo agoI think the argument is that NSA already knows exactly how valuable metadata is, while the average person significantly underestimates its importance without a concrete demonstration.
- xorcist 7mo agoThe same NSA that publicly states "We kill people over metadata"? If that's the type of things they say publicly at conferences we can only imagine what a more sensitive comment would look like. How anyone can underestimate the importance of that is beyond me.
- johnthescott 7mo agospread a false story in public news and monitor cell call graphs.