Maar wat zou de NSA nou kunnen met die metagegevens? Een van de mooiste blogs die dat duidelijk maken, vind ik toch wel Using metadata to find Paul Revere van Kieran Healy.
In zijn blog doet Healy alsof hij werkt voor de achttiende eeuwse "Royal Security Agency", en in 1772 op basis van zeer beperkte informatie moet zien te achterhalen wie mogelijk koloniale (Amerikaanse) opstandelingen zijn.
[...]I should emphasize again that I know nothing of current affairs in the colonies. However, our current Eighteenth Century beta of PRISM has been used to collect and analyze information on more than two hundred and sixty persons (of varying degrees of suspicion) belonging variously to seven different organizations in the Boston area.Daarna legt Healy stap voor stap uit hoe je op basis van enkel de lidmaatschapsgegevens van zeven clubs, heel interessante gegevens kunt achterhalen. Je kunt niet alleen zien wie wie kent van welke club, je kunt ook allerlei interessante netwerk-plaatjes maken, zoals die hierboven.
Rest assured that we only collected metadata on these people, and no actual conversations were recorded or meetings transcribed. All I know is whether someone was a member of an organization or not. Surely this is but a small encroachment on the freedom of the Crown’s subjects. I have been asked, on the basis of this poor information, to present some names for our field agents in the Colonies to work with. It seems an unlikely task.
Het interessante van dat netwerk is dat in het midden een naam ziet staan van iemand, die als een soort "kruispunt" fungeert: Paul Revere. (Als je inzoomt, zie je het ook)
Ook andere netwerk-berekeningen op basis van die 7 bij 255 rijen tonen aan dat die Revere een centrale rol speelt in het opstandige Boston rond 1770.
Nu is wat historische achtergrond essentieel.
Paul Revere speelde namelijk inderdaad een cruciale rol bij de opstand tegen het Britse leger. Zo was hij onder andere belast met het verzamelen van informatie over de Engelse militairen die in 1775 Boston belegerden.
Als die Britten wat beter hadden kunnen rekenen, hadden ze dat dus kunnen weten!
So, there you have it. From a table of membership in different groups we have gotten a picture of a kind of social network between individuals, a sense of the degree of connection between organizations, and some strong hints of who the key players are in this world. And all this—all of it!—from the merest sliver of metadata about a single modality of relationship between people. I do not wish to overstep the remit of my memorandum but I must ask you to imagine what might be possible if we were but able to collect information on very many more people, and also synthesize information from different kinds of ties between people! For the simple methods I have described are quite generalizable in these ways, and their capability only becomes more apparent as the size and scope of the information they are given increases. We would not need to know what was being whispered between individuals, only that they were connected in various ways. The analytical engine would do the rest! [...]Fascinerend en eng tegelijk!
I admit that, in addition to the possibilities for finding something interesting, there may also be the prospect of discovering suggestive but ultimately incorrect or misleading patterns. But I feel this problem would surely be greatly ameliorated by more and better metadata. At the present time, alas, the technology required to automatically collect the required information is beyond our capacity. But I say again, if a mere scribe such as I—one who knows nearly nothing—can use the very simplest of these methods to pick the name of a traitor like Paul Revere from those of two hundred and fifty four other men, using nothing but a list of memberships and a portable calculating engine, then just think what weapons we might wield in the defense of liberty one or two centuries from now.
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