We don't know how the no fly lists are compiled, and what rating and weighting systems might be used.
Probably the best developed data mining systems so far are the ones used by Google .
I'll give a few brief examples
if you got confirmation of a flight through an email to a gmail account, try looking at the airport on google maps - it will have your date of flight shown in a bubble on the airport - google tracks your movements and what you buy.
If you are posting photos through G+, it will ask you to label the photos that have human faces on http://arc-team-open-research.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/anthropolog.html (google tracks who your friends are, and what they look like)
The link shows that the facial recognition software (at least up to the time of that blog post) was not good enough to discriminate real humans from photo realistic art work.
The adds which google sends you, and the search suggestions and youtube suggestions which it comes up with are often fairly spurious too - or at least they are for me.
So, Google probably has the best automated datamining capability available, but it still throws up some seriously spurious conclusions (the targetted adds and search suggestions which it feeds to you).
The automated side of the NSA and the other three letter agencies - I seriously doubt if they are as good at it as google is - are going to be at least equally spurios
To me that is both comforting because I don't want a 1984 style panopticon society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon, and it is worrying because people are getting droned on the basis of that system's ratings.
and similar datamining is probably being used to compile the no fly lists...
Probably the best developed data mining systems so far are the ones used by Google .
I'll give a few brief examples
if you got confirmation of a flight through an email to a gmail account, try looking at the airport on google maps - it will have your date of flight shown in a bubble on the airport - google tracks your movements and what you buy.
If you are posting photos through G+, it will ask you to label the photos that have human faces on http://arc-team-open-research.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/anthropolog.html (google tracks who your friends are, and what they look like)
The link shows that the facial recognition software (at least up to the time of that blog post) was not good enough to discriminate real humans from photo realistic art work.
The adds which google sends you, and the search suggestions and youtube suggestions which it comes up with are often fairly spurious too - or at least they are for me.
So, Google probably has the best automated datamining capability available, but it still throws up some seriously spurious conclusions (the targetted adds and search suggestions which it feeds to you).
The automated side of the NSA and the other three letter agencies - I seriously doubt if they are as good at it as google is - are going to be at least equally spurios
To me that is both comforting because I don't want a 1984 style panopticon society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon, and it is worrying because people are getting droned on the basis of that system's ratings.
and similar datamining is probably being used to compile the no fly lists...
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