Very Interesting
Lisa English is back writing regularly at Ruminate This after an extended hiatus, and she has an interesting find in Pursuing The Impossible. . . Or A Method To Their Madness?
Over at Counterpunch she found an article, The Politics of Paranoia and Intimidation by Floyd Rudmin, a professor of social and community psychology at the University of Tromsø in Norway.
I don’t assume that Counterpunch always fact checks, and am unfamiliar with Dr. Rudmin, so it was time to do a little searching to see what I could find.
His academic credentials are fine: BA Philosophy from Bowduin College, MA Audiology from SUNY Buffalo, and MA, PhD Psychology from Queen’s University in Canada. He is a pacifist and well-published in his field.
As a social psychologist he crunches a lot of numbers as statistics is possibly the only way you can derive an real answers in his field, so he has a practical background for his claims.
He mentions Bayes’ theorem and everyone’s mind shuts down, saying what do I know about this geeky stuff?
Actually you are using it in the background every day if you are using e-mail because Bayesian probability is a feature of most effective spam filters.
All of the weird, random word lists that you see in spam e-mails is there to confuse Bayesian filters. Now that the filters have been adjusted, they are using short news articles segments for the same purpose.
Bayesian filters are primary tools if you are attempting to find things in a mass of data, but you have to have a pattern to begin. You have to have some idea what you are looking for before you can find it. If you are looking for a needle in a haystack you really need to know what kind of needle. If it’s a steel needle, you could speed things up with a powerful magnet, but if it’s a bone needle, you have a real problem.
What they tell us they are attempting to do doesn’t make sense to those of us who work with data bases. Dr. Rudmin’s suggestion for what he thinks they are doing with the data, makes all too much sense.
2 comments
Bayes’ theorem is not rocket science, and its implications here need not puzzle the average reader, even the math-phobic reader. The short version: the method NSA is allegedly using to track terrorists would work effectively only if there were a huge number of terrorists in the U.S. population. There are surely not that many terrorists in America, but there are plenty of opponents of Mr. Bush.
So if the watchers were looking, not for terrorists, but for Mr. Bush’s opponents, specifically, opponents making phone calls and sending emails while organizing to defeat GOP candidates in the 2006 elections, or perhaps to advocate impeachment of Bush himself, they might well be able to spot and track such organizations in the patterns they are monitoring.
Let’s review: it’s demonstrably useless for finding terrorists; it’s possibly effective for identifying political opponents and their organizing efforts. What kind of government does that? You got it right in one.
If there’s no pattern to match, pattern matching doesn’t work.
It has never made sense to me because these guys do not “phone home”.
They keep building data bases that only make sense if you’re are spying on the population of the United States.