Who has had an affair? Who has masturbated? Who has had oral sex in a state where it is illegal? Who has visited a prostitute? Who has smoked a joint? Who has driven home with a BAC > 0.05? Who has had a racy phone conversation with a lover? Who has flirted with a married person? Who has said nasty stuff about their boss? Who has made a racial or ethnic slur? Who has looked at porn? Who has run a stop sign? Who has cheated on their income tax? Who has exceeded the speed limit?

Bring me a hot cup of Kafka.

I corrected myself—please see post #11. (The warrant requirements for a pen register are lower than for a wiretap—I misremembered and thought they were non-existent.)

SamChevre

The problem is that by the time you get to the tenth degree, you have likely covered the entire population of the USA. And the system can’t just be used to discover terrorist cells who use the phone network, it can also be used to discover all sorts of other groups. Plus, it can identify the central people in these groups. If Bush wants to find out who were the really important people behind the latest immigration law protests, can he use this database for that? You bet. He can identify crucial links, important people who perhaps don’t even know themselves that they are important. He can identify all sorts of decision makers and leaders, on all levels, as long as they use the phone network as a primary means of communication.

But you may be right, in that terrorist cells probably aren’t so stupid they use the regular phone network for communicating. It’s honest people who do that. And Bush hasn’t bothered with warrants. That is another sign that it may well be honest people he wants the NSA to tap in on.

Switch to encrypted net connections, and impeach him, before it’s too late.

I assume some of you, as social scientists or perhaps computer scientists, know what can be extracted from such a huge graph, and what can not. From what I’ve seen of the news coverage, they know and care nothing about the data mining potential.

That people understand this is more important than discussing potential legal strategies. There’s always some way that government can find a bizarre legal strategy to justify its actions, as long as they have the public support – their history shows this. But I don’t think they will have that public support once people understand that with that database, the president can probably uncover half of all the marital infidelities in the US, if he wants to.

I imagine a popular website editor suddenly getting troubles at work, being accused of crimes (with good evidence turning up), while the hysterical site that the NSA knows has little or negative impact gets left alone.

Or it could be used the other way around: find out who the influential people on your side are, and make sure they have everything they need.

On the axis going from total anarchy to total police state there must be a point where you feel most comfortable and this point is different for different people and for each person under different circumstances.

For example, I would like them to register all firearms and have a database of that.

National ID card? Maybe.

A GPS tracking device in every car? In every skull? There is a point where this will make you uncomfortable even if it provides great benefits for all sorts of things.

See http://www.imdb.com/interfaces for pointers to both the data and the licensing information. You’d want at least running-times.list.gz; what else you’d want would depend on what exactly you were studying.