A Budding John Markoff?
Steve Lohr writes for NYT that an expert is wary about IAO’s all-seeing TIA database. Borrowing a page from John Markoff’s playbook, he starts with an exciting and heroic thesis, and then shops around for facts that might support the basic theme.Unfortunately, he doesn’t have grasp enoughof the basic facts to realize that his facts are working opposite his thesis.
Thesis: “the chief executive of a venture capital firm founded by the CIA warns of the danger of amassing a large, unified database that would be available to government investigators”.
The thesisis classic Markoff technique — Lohr’s CIA-CEO-VC is almost as inspiring as Markoff’s Poet-Ninja-Hacker character in “Takedown”.
Quote: “data mining alone is not enough”, and “it’s very dangerous to give the government total access”.
This seems to support the thesis, but seems like vanilla common-sense and is not very specific. Let’s read further:
Quote: “the real lesson learned from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Louie said, wasthat …the information held by different government agencies was not linked, shared and analyzed.”
Huh? In other words, this guy is advocating on behalf of data warehousing and analysis.
Quote: The alternative, which Louie supports, starts with some kind of investigative lead and then uses software tools to scan for links between a person under investigation and known terrorists, in terms of where they live, recent travel and other behavior.
Great. Now we see that Louie is just evangelizing his own technique of data mining which he doesn’t want to call data mining. It still requires data warehousing.
Quote: Information, noted Louie, a former computer game designer and software executive, was kept in separate database silos … the agency realized that this stove-piping of information was a security model that was really vulnerable.
Finally, Louie explains why he is a fan of data warehouses. Could Lohr have done a worse job of selecting quotes to support his thesis? Obviously, Louie is a great believer in the utility of large unified governmentdatabases (which is smart, by the way). As for Lohr, he’s still not ready for his spielmaster’s license — at least not until he learns to get his stories straight.