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This is even worse than it seems. A "hop" can go both ways. So if a terror suspect calls Comcast's main 800 number (or any other high volume number) they can tr

by spikels 13y ago

This is even worse than it seems. A "hop" can go both ways. So if a terror suspect calls Comcast's main 800 number (or any other high volume number) they can track everyone who ever called that number. And obviously they have to deal with the fact that many people have multiple numbers and treat them as a single node. Three hops from a few thousand suspected terrorists each with multiple phone numbers might include a large fraction of the US population. Not sure how this could possibly be helpful in an investigation if everyone is a suspect. At some point you have to narrow it down. Edit: Apparently there are 875,000 names in the "Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment" (TIDE) [1] So if each of those suspects can be connected to 20 people (hop 1 - 20 people) and each those people can be connected to an additional 20 people (hop 2 - 400 people) and connected again to 21 more (hop 3 - 8,000 people) you could reach the entire world's population. 875,000 x 8,000 = 7 billion [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/03/us-usa-security-database-idUSBRE94200720130503 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/03/us-usa-security-da...

jlgreco 13y ago
I wonder how many "hops" the average American is away from Kevin Bacon. My guess is that 3 is on the low end of it. Just a guess: Me<->Senator<->Movie Exec<->Kevin Bacon With 4 or more hops it surely becomes pretty trivial. "Phonecall hops" are a much lower bar than "worked with" hops.
- s_q_b 13y ago
  If you have a nearly universal database, you can probably get pretty close to covering the entire population of the country with 3 hops.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    marshray downthread brings up a great point (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6059864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6059864) Even if you assume a low chance of everyone getting hit in 3 hops from one Kevin Bacon, there of course isn't just one Kevin Bacon. That "terrorist watch list" is pretty damn long.
- spikels 13y ago
  I don't see why they would limit it to phone calls. It would make more sense to use ANY connection: coworkers, phone call, text, email, Facebook friend, relatives, members of organization/school/church, physical location, etc. Any of these could be a "hop".
- edvinbesic 13y ago
  Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is a parlor game based on the "six degrees of separation" concept, which posits that any two people on Earth are six or less acquaintance links apart. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon
- tolmasky 13y ago
  The article specifically addresses this question: > For a sense of scale, researchers at the University of Milan found in 2011 that everyone on the Internet was, on average, 4.74 steps away from anyone else.
- gknoy 13y ago
  The article noted people everyone on the internet is on average 4.74 hops from someone else. [1] If they say "Two or three", that makes me believe that they have no constraints on it, and merely query as many hops' worth of data as is enough to give what they feel to be Enough. "Two or three" implies, IMO, "... to five". 1: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/technology/between-you-and-me-4-74-degrees.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/technology/between-you-and...
- ChrisAntaki 13y ago
  >> With 4 or more hops it surely becomes pretty trivial. Just a heads up, your example only had 3 hops. You (Hop 1) Senator (Hop 2) Movie Exec (Hop 3) Kevin Bacon
- vidarh 13y ago
  I'd think you have a good shot at two, almost guaranteed no more than 3. I'm from Norway, and yet can easily make that kind of connection in 4 hops: I've spoken to a few Norwegian MP's, who obviously have spoken to quite a few Norwegian prime ministers. There's probably a number of other connections from her as she would have met any number of internationally renowned people both in capacity as prime minister and as WHO director - including US politicians - that might have met Kevin Bacon, but courtesy of the Oracle of Bacon she also has a Bacon number of 2 based on appearing in a talkshow as a guest alongside Michael Bolton documentary with Michael Bolton, who has appeared in some awards show with Kevin Bacon. Chances are good there's some less obvious route that'd get me there in 3 hops. Once you "allow" off screen meetings, it gets really easy. It would surprise me, for example, if Kevin Bacon hasn't met some relatively prominent US politicians and/or celebrities that has met one of the Norwegian MP's I've spoken to (for two hops), or if he hasn't met one of the US politicians or artists that have been at the Nobel peace price concerts, where they'd have met either aforementioned Gro Harlem Brundtland or any number of other Norwegian politicians that would either include someone I've met or definitively have met someone I've met (for 3 hops). I think people tend to overestimate how many steps it'll take, because they see these celebrities and politicians they can't relate to that they think are so far apart from "their" world, but of course that is silly because these people tend to meet a lot of people, and so are natural "shortcuts" to get low number of hops to anyone. For example: I'm two hops from Mao and Castro (via a trade-union rep I met that was introduced to Mao on a group trip to China in the 60's, and a former left wing politician I've met that met Castro on a visit to Cuba), and as a result at most 3 hops from Stalin and Nixon and most other major leaders contemporaneous with either of them, ranging from "ordinary politicians" to a fascinating laundry list of horrible dictators. It really is a small world.
whiskeychaser 13y ago
"Not sure how this could possibly be helpful in an investigation if everyone is a suspect." b/c it has nothing to do with an investigation...now blackmail and extortion??? That's another story.
- rayiner 13y ago
  [citation needed] for the blackmail and extortion. It's inane to be so quick to jump from mere ability to do something bad to intent to do something bad.
  - Terretta 13y ago
    The FBI letter blackmailing MLK to kill himself: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/king-like-all-frauds-your-end-is.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/king-like-all-frauds-yo... Summed up by a history prof: When you teach American history as I do, you get asked about conspiracies a lot. As it happens, I’m skeptical about some of the biggest conspiracy theories out there — unlike nearly all of my students, for instance, I think it’s highly likely that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. But I’m not one to ridicule such theories either, and I find the smug dismissal with which they’re so often greeted deeply obnoxious. Because forty-seven years ago one of America’s highest ranking law enforcement agents launched a secret campaign intended to blackmail the country’s most prominent civil rights activist into committing suicide. That’s not a theory, it’s a fact. And once you know that, it gets a lot harder to dismiss other people’s stories of shadowy government goings-on. -- http://studentactivism.net/2012/01/15/the-fbis-attempt-to-blackmail-martin-luther-king-into-suicide/ http://studentactivism.net/2012/01/15/the-fbis-attempt-to-bl...
    - tptacek 13y ago
      Comparing the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover to the DoJ's FBI of 2013 is like comparing the Long Island State Park Commission of Robert Moses to the New York State Office of Parks & Recreation of 2013. Hoover's FBI was a personal fiefdom accountable to nobody, not even the President. Also, odious as the letter is, it's not exactly forceful. If MLK's civil rights struggle had been shifted forward in time today and he had posted the "I Have A Dream" speech directly to Youtube, he'd have found far worse.
brown9-2 13y ago
You're correct - if it's not useful to the investigation of the person who called Comcast, why would they look at everyone who has called Comcast? Common sense says that they would not look at that data. If the response is "well they're power hungry, they'll look at whatever they want" then the discussion about the number of hops used is irrelevant since a power-hungry and abusive organization would find no value in limits on this sort of thing in the first place.
- rayiner 13y ago
  You're 100% right and don't deserve the downvotes. If the rebuttal is that they're power-hungry and abusive, the discussion about the number of hops is utterly pointless.
  - unclebucknasty 13y ago
    Actually, it's the opposite. The discussion about the number of hops is the result of their attempts to thwart oversight. They are misrepresenting what they are doing, so as to avoid constraints. In other words, they are power-hungry and abusive.
- Terretta 13y ago
  On the contrary, common sense--as most of us understand it--has nothing to do with this. The rationale is to gather all data that's potentially useful at some unknown point in the future, and hang on to it for that unknown eventuality. Case in point: all the license plate surveillance stories that came out today. (Not sure why today, this has been well understood for a couple years now.) Every single government official and LEO talked to about this data say that gathering and keeping the data indefinitely on 260 million plates, in order to apprehend just 136 individuals, is good practice. If that's your definition of common sense, I want nothing to do with it. And the point of this "hops" story isn't whether they're looking at everyone now, it's whether your data is being automatically gathered and stored today to construct who knows what perspectives about you in the future. And at 3 hops of potentially useful data, odds are yes.
  - 13y ago
rayiner 13y ago
I don't know why you would assume a hop goes both ways.
- spikels 13y ago
  First because it could be potentially useful if you want to catch terrorists. For example if a suspected terrorist calls person X and person Y also calls X, X may be the terrorist leader and Y may be another terrorist. Second why would they limit it to one direction? There seems to be little if any legal or practical downside to simply collecting more data.
rhizome 13y ago
So if a terror suspect calls Comcast's main 800 number (or any other high volume number) they can track everyone who ever called that number Note Comcast and other commodity services and their tendency for geographical monopolies, and that this is wholeheartedly supported by the governments by which they operate.
- samstave 13y ago
  >"Comcast harbors and supports terrorism." Got it.
  - inafield 13y ago
    >"The government is an accomplice to companies that harbors and supports terrorism." Got it.
    - kyzyl 13y ago
      "inafield and samstave both authored posts which were found to contain positive sentiment towards the topic 'support terrorism'" Got it. Forever. --NSA
      - vidarh 13y ago
        You posted a comment in reply to one of them. You're just one hop away from a potential terrorist. Now they've got you too, forever. (And me as well, but seeing as I'm a dirty foreigner I'm sure they've got me already)
JulianMorrison 13y ago
It's not so much "everyone is a suspect". It's "everyone is recorded"; investigating any suspect becomes not a matter of data collection, but of data collation. A hadoop job.

by spikels 13y ago

jlgreco 13y ago

I wonder how many "hops" the average American is away from Kevin Bacon. My guess is that 3 is on the low end of it. Just a guess: Me<->Senator<->Movie Exec<->Kevin Bacon With 4 or more hops it surely becomes pretty trivial. "Phonecall hops" are a much lower bar than "worked with" hops.

s_q_b 13y ago
If you have a nearly universal database, you can probably get pretty close to covering the entire population of the country with 3 hops.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  marshray downthread brings up a great point (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6059864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6059864) Even if you assume a low chance of everyone getting hit in 3 hops from one Kevin Bacon, there of course isn't just one Kevin Bacon. That "terrorist watch list" is pretty damn long.
spikels 13y ago
I don't see why they would limit it to phone calls. It would make more sense to use ANY connection: coworkers, phone call, text, email, Facebook friend, relatives, members of organization/school/church, physical location, etc. Any of these could be a "hop".
edvinbesic 13y ago
Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon is a parlor game based on the "six degrees of separation" concept, which posits that any two people on Earth are six or less acquaintance links apart. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon
tolmasky 13y ago
The article specifically addresses this question: > For a sense of scale, researchers at the University of Milan found in 2011 that everyone on the Internet was, on average, 4.74 steps away from anyone else.
gknoy 13y ago
The article noted people everyone on the internet is on average 4.74 hops from someone else. [1] If they say "Two or three", that makes me believe that they have no constraints on it, and merely query as many hops' worth of data as is enough to give what they feel to be Enough. "Two or three" implies, IMO, "... to five". 1: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/technology/between-you-and-me-4-74-degrees.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/22/technology/between-you-and...
ChrisAntaki 13y ago
>> With 4 or more hops it surely becomes pretty trivial. Just a heads up, your example only had 3 hops. You (Hop 1) Senator (Hop 2) Movie Exec (Hop 3) Kevin Bacon
vidarh 13y ago
I'd think you have a good shot at two, almost guaranteed no more than 3. I'm from Norway, and yet can easily make that kind of connection in 4 hops: I've spoken to a few Norwegian MP's, who obviously have spoken to quite a few Norwegian prime ministers. There's probably a number of other connections from her as she would have met any number of internationally renowned people both in capacity as prime minister and as WHO director - including US politicians - that might have met Kevin Bacon, but courtesy of the Oracle of Bacon she also has a Bacon number of 2 based on appearing in a talkshow as a guest alongside Michael Bolton documentary with Michael Bolton, who has appeared in some awards show with Kevin Bacon. Chances are good there's some less obvious route that'd get me there in 3 hops. Once you "allow" off screen meetings, it gets really easy. It would surprise me, for example, if Kevin Bacon hasn't met some relatively prominent US politicians and/or celebrities that has met one of the Norwegian MP's I've spoken to (for two hops), or if he hasn't met one of the US politicians or artists that have been at the Nobel peace price concerts, where they'd have met either aforementioned Gro Harlem Brundtland or any number of other Norwegian politicians that would either include someone I've met or definitively have met someone I've met (for 3 hops). I think people tend to overestimate how many steps it'll take, because they see these celebrities and politicians they can't relate to that they think are so far apart from "their" world, but of course that is silly because these people tend to meet a lot of people, and so are natural "shortcuts" to get low number of hops to anyone. For example: I'm two hops from Mao and Castro (via a trade-union rep I met that was introduced to Mao on a group trip to China in the 60's, and a former left wing politician I've met that met Castro on a visit to Cuba), and as a result at most 3 hops from Stalin and Nixon and most other major leaders contemporaneous with either of them, ranging from "ordinary politicians" to a fascinating laundry list of horrible dictators. It really is a small world.

whiskeychaser 13y ago

"Not sure how this could possibly be helpful in an investigation if everyone is a suspect." b/c it has nothing to do with an investigation...now blackmail and extortion??? That's another story.

rayiner 13y ago
[citation needed] for the blackmail and extortion. It's inane to be so quick to jump from mere ability to do something bad to intent to do something bad.
- Terretta 13y ago
  The FBI letter blackmailing MLK to kill himself: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/king-like-all-frauds-your-end-is.html http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/01/king-like-all-frauds-yo... Summed up by a history prof: When you teach American history as I do, you get asked about conspiracies a lot. As it happens, I’m skeptical about some of the biggest conspiracy theories out there — unlike nearly all of my students, for instance, I think it’s highly likely that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. But I’m not one to ridicule such theories either, and I find the smug dismissal with which they’re so often greeted deeply obnoxious. Because forty-seven years ago one of America’s highest ranking law enforcement agents launched a secret campaign intended to blackmail the country’s most prominent civil rights activist into committing suicide. That’s not a theory, it’s a fact. And once you know that, it gets a lot harder to dismiss other people’s stories of shadowy government goings-on. -- http://studentactivism.net/2012/01/15/the-fbis-attempt-to-blackmail-martin-luther-king-into-suicide/ http://studentactivism.net/2012/01/15/the-fbis-attempt-to-bl...
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Comparing the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover to the DoJ's FBI of 2013 is like comparing the Long Island State Park Commission of Robert Moses to the New York State Office of Parks & Recreation of 2013. Hoover's FBI was a personal fiefdom accountable to nobody, not even the President. Also, odious as the letter is, it's not exactly forceful. If MLK's civil rights struggle had been shifted forward in time today and he had posted the "I Have A Dream" speech directly to Youtube, he'd have found far worse.

brown9-2 13y ago

You're correct - if it's not useful to the investigation of the person who called Comcast, why would they look at everyone who has called Comcast? Common sense says that they would not look at that data. If the response is "well they're power hungry, they'll look at whatever they want" then the discussion about the number of hops used is irrelevant since a power-hungry and abusive organization would find no value in limits on this sort of thing in the first place.

rayiner 13y ago
You're 100% right and don't deserve the downvotes. If the rebuttal is that they're power-hungry and abusive, the discussion about the number of hops is utterly pointless.
- unclebucknasty 13y ago
  Actually, it's the opposite. The discussion about the number of hops is the result of their attempts to thwart oversight. They are misrepresenting what they are doing, so as to avoid constraints. In other words, they are power-hungry and abusive.
Terretta 13y ago
On the contrary, common sense--as most of us understand it--has nothing to do with this. The rationale is to gather all data that's potentially useful at some unknown point in the future, and hang on to it for that unknown eventuality. Case in point: all the license plate surveillance stories that came out today. (Not sure why today, this has been well understood for a couple years now.) Every single government official and LEO talked to about this data say that gathering and keeping the data indefinitely on 260 million plates, in order to apprehend just 136 individuals, is good practice. If that's your definition of common sense, I want nothing to do with it. And the point of this "hops" story isn't whether they're looking at everyone now, it's whether your data is being automatically gathered and stored today to construct who knows what perspectives about you in the future. And at 3 hops of potentially useful data, odds are yes.
- 13y ago

rayiner 13y ago

I don't know why you would assume a hop goes both ways.

spikels 13y ago
First because it could be potentially useful if you want to catch terrorists. For example if a suspected terrorist calls person X and person Y also calls X, X may be the terrorist leader and Y may be another terrorist. Second why would they limit it to one direction? There seems to be little if any legal or practical downside to simply collecting more data.

rhizome 13y ago

So if a terror suspect calls Comcast's main 800 number (or any other high volume number) they can track everyone who ever called that number Note Comcast and other commodity services and their tendency for geographical monopolies, and that this is wholeheartedly supported by the governments by which they operate.

samstave 13y ago
>"Comcast harbors and supports terrorism." Got it.
- inafield 13y ago
  >"The government is an accomplice to companies that harbors and supports terrorism." Got it.
  - kyzyl 13y ago
    "inafield and samstave both authored posts which were found to contain positive sentiment towards the topic 'support terrorism'" Got it. Forever. --NSA
    - vidarh 13y ago
      You posted a comment in reply to one of them. You're just one hop away from a potential terrorist. Now they've got you too, forever. (And me as well, but seeing as I'm a dirty foreigner I'm sure they've got me already)

JulianMorrison 13y ago

It's not so much "everyone is a suspect". It's "everyone is recorded"; investigating any suspect becomes not a matter of data collection, but of data collation. A hadoop job.