Archive for November 28th, 2008

This semester, in my Science and Technology in the Global Arena course, I wrote a five page assessment of “knowledge discovery” tools for counterterrorim efforts. I focused primarily on the most famous effort, DARPA’s Total Information Awareness project, but the concerns apply to the many data mining endeavors of counterterrorist organizations. Here’s an excerpt and the PDF of the paper (licensed CC-BY):

“Total Information Awareness and its progeny remain a much sought after tool in the fight against asymmetric threats. However, in their history and current forms, knowledge discovery systems remain woefully unprepared to deal with the unique technical difficulties presented by terrorism. A lack of modeling and presence of inaccurate data, resulting in a crippling amount of false positives, seems to confine these efforts to the realm of highly speculative research unfit for wide deployment in the law enforcement and intelligence communities. “