Interesting Daily Kos article from a data miner on the NSAs database of phone numbers. -via pedro.

All of this brings us to ask who the real targets of all of this spying is . . . In order to identify them [terrorists], you need to know an awful lot about those who are not terrorists. This helps to eliminate false positives. However, the data for terrorists is so sparse, that even if a possible terrorist is identified, the algorithms used will rarely generate a high probability and a high confidence . . . On the other hand, if you want to predict how a person will vote in a given election, you can get an amazingly accurate prediction from the high-quality data from Joe and Jane Sixpack.

These days the news makes me feel as if I am two bit character in a badly made, futuristic movie with an overtly Orwellian bent:

Voice Over:

I crouch in a corner of my living room that is not in the line of sight of the telephone. I scrawl this diary on squares of self rationed toilet paper with a sliver of wood and my own blood as ink. I have a box hidden under a floor board that contains french fries, a small bottle of french wine and a few outlawed texts and pamphlets. Each night I eat one fry, take a small pull from the bottle and read a ragged photocopy of a document titled the United States Constitution. I can't remember the first time I read this document, or what its significance is. I just know it's important somehow, and I read it over and over.