There is a great deal of information about us out there in cyberspace. Banks and credit card companies have a record of every credit card purchase we've ever made. Phone companies have a record of every telephone call. Credit bureaus know how much money we've borrowed and how reliable we are in paying our debts.
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| | | Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com). | |
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The information in cyberspace is like an immense mound of ore strewn with golden nuggets. If businesses can sift through the ore to find the nuggets, they can improve profitability and reduce costs by marketing more effectively.
The process that businesses use to sift through the mountain of cyberspace ore is called data mining. Industry expert Tim Graettinger has described it as "the data-driven discovery and modeling of hidden patterns in large volumes of data. . . . Via data mining, a user can discover patterns and build models automatically, without knowing exactly what she's looking for."
Graettinger, a senior consultant with a data mining firm called The Modeling Agency, uses a case from the banking world to show how the process can succeed. Keystone Financial, based in Williamsport, launched a promotion known as LoanCheck. It mailed a $5,000 check to its customers, which they could cash at any branch to initiate a loan. Keystone wanted to use LoanCheck to expand its customer base. Its database tracks about 300 characteristics of each customer. The bank then established a data mining program to discover the characteristics of the customers most likely to accept the LoanCheck offer. Then Keystone applied the model to a list of 400,000 prospects obtained from a credit bureau. The result: 12,000 new customers.
Data mining guards against fraud. Graettinger cites Blue Cross/Blue Shield in New York state, which uses data mining to protect against false patient claims from physicians. Deviations in a physician's behavior relative to his or her peer group are reported to fraud investigators as a "suspicion index." A physician who performs a high number of procedures per visit, charges 40 percent more per patient, or sees many patients on the weekend would be flagged.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- the folks who invented the Internet -- want to develop a program like the one Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield uses to protect Americans from terror attacks. But yahoos on both the left and the right are trying to stop them.
The premise behind the DARPA program, which is called Total Information Awareness (TIA), is that certain critical activities must take place before a terror attack can be launched. These include casing targets, rehearsing, procuring financing, supplies and weapons, and assembling an attack team. It is all but impossible to conduct these activities without leaving a trail in cyberspace.
TIA software would search Internet databases for signs of these terrorist activities. For instance, if someone on a terror watch list made big bank withdrawals, bought airplane tickets, made a lot of overseas phone calls to numbers linked to terror groups, or purchased with a credit card precursor materials for a bomb or chemical weapon, the TIA program could spot the activity and hone in.
If TIA had been up and running in 2001, it is likely the Sept. 11 hijackers would have been identified before they struck. Two of the hijackers were on a State Department watch list. Phone records indicated that they were calling each other. They bought airline tickets on the same day. A search of the people they called regularly would have uncovered other young Arab males who also had bought airline tickets for the same day. A more detailed search would have revealed that several had attended flight schools together. A computer program trolling the Internet for these indicators would have popped up a red flag.
The Senate voted unanimously Jan. 23 to withhold funding for TIA, on the grounds that it is a threat to civil liberties. But every element of the program already is legal. The government has the right to search its own databases. And the government has the right to search private databases, which it is doing right now in an effort to find sources of terrorist funding. All TIA would do is to permit the government to do swiftly and efficiently what it is now doing clumsily and inefficiently.
Blocking TIA will not protect our liberties. But it will diminish our safety.
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