The Association rules is the other method used

"It is has not hereditary American monarchy, or powers that have been created by the Constitution", the federal judge Anna Diggs, argued when she said, on 18 August, that allowed justice warrantless eavesdropping programs were illegal. This decision followed a complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. It had before the courts after several media have made public the existence of monitoring of population programmes, carried out in secret by the NSA security agencies. The combat judicial whether or not these programs are legal is only beginning, and most observers expect that it ended only after a final decision of the Supreme Court of the United States. In the meantime, the public would know how the US Government to "spy".

Since the first laws, so-called Patriot Act, passed in the wake of September 11, 2001, which granted credits and judicial facilities to the authorities, everyone knows that it is much more than simple phone tapping.

Today, after several revelations of American media, the Government does cache more than beyond programs that allow recording communications and electronic mail, it relies in particular on the technique of "data mining" (search of data). A powerful software technology used to obtain automatically the correlations between computerized data from different sources, provide events or strategies. Thus, for example, "data mining" enables financial organizations to reduce credit card fraud by analyzing transactions in real time. Adapted to the wide distribution, these software are able, after analyzing the behavior of consumers through their purchases, suggest the outline of a marketing campaign...

The inordinate taste of government security agencies for this technology was highlighted by publication of an official report issued by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) two years ago. The Observatory of the practices of the federal administration had identified 200 programs of "data mining", of which 14 were adapted to the fight against terrorism and to prevent attacks. And again, this statistic did not take into account activities of the NSA and the CIA, who refused to answer. Since then, the outlines of some of the more confidential programs developed by these agencies, such as Advise (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement), funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), revealed by the press. They all feature to use the data collected from millions of people living in the United States, in an attempt to flush out potential terrorists.

Opaque actions

However, such programs had already been censored by the US Senate as early as 2003. In particular, the Total Information Awareness (TIA) and the $ 100 million it would cost. Version II, this program would bring data bases of the Government with business files to track the lives of people in which justice has (yet) to blame.

Bruce Schneir, one of the leading experts on computer security in the United States, the forced abandonment of the TIA program has nothing changed. In fact, these programs would now piloted by the Ministry of defence (DoD), certain actions are even more opaque. As the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which had to undergo him also the parliamentary ire with the removal of the CAPPS II program, he replaced it with the Secure Flight (aviation safety) program, which is based on the same philosophy: consolidate personal databases and research of correlation between these different data.

When it is applied to the fight against terrorism, "data mining" is based on two methods. The first is called "analysis of links". It is to use algorithms to implement relationship via complex paths, already suspicious persons with others unknown to the police. And software continue to analyze their behaviour by focusing on their potential to correspondence with individuals living considered "sensitive" countries (Pakistan, for example). The "Association rules" is the other method used. For example, a telephone call in one of these sensitive countries, followed immediately by a set purchase cash... For sophisticated and expensive be they, the efforts of the U.S. Government to use the computer in its fight against terrorism are nevertheless judged severely by some specialists.

This is the case of Valdis Krebs, an analyst has become famous for showing, with the "data mining", the links that existed between the hijackers of September 11, 2001. He believes that the ambitious programs Government are too large to produce concrete results. "If in is statistical data, will it raise so many false alarms that they will be inoperative", he explains. A view shared by Bruce Schneir. According to him, only 1 margin of error on the analysis of bank transactions and communications of the American population would be 1 billion false alarms, either... 27 million per day.

For specialists, if "data mining" anti-terrorism wants to be as effective in the economic sector, it must be framed. And can be used only after real investigations on certain individuals. And cease to be a "blind" manipulated in the greater opacity by intelligence specialists who know not what they seek...