more on Heather MacDonald lashes out at "privacy fanatics" opposed to TIA, CAPPS II

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Sun, 04 Apr 2004 15:58:20 -0400
From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed () reed com>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on Heather MacDonald lashes out at "privacy fanatics"
 opposed to TIA, CAPPS II [priv]
X-Sender: mail.reed.com:dpreed@127.0.0.1
To: dave () farber net, Hiawatha Bray <hbray () mailblocks com>

Dave - for IP.

Hiawatha misses the point (as does Ms. MacDonald).   It wasn't just the 
privacy wonks who objected to TIA.   TIA was an idea that appealed to those 
who think that rumors are definitive intelligence (like politicians of all 
stripes who seek an intelligence service that tells them only what they 
want to hear), and was being pursued with no scientific checks on its 
implementation.  Poindexter's flaw was that he was enamored of cool 
technology, but was letting speculative ideas with no scientific validation 
become operational programs.

Hiawatha is wrong in his presumption that  TIA was a research project. TIA 
was not a research project.  It was a DARPA project, but plenty of DARPA 
projects are not research - the bulk of DARPA work is advanced development, 
and has always been.

I think it *would* be excellent scientific research to answer the question 
of whether the kind of "garbage picking" data mining of random financial 
transactions, etc.  that TIA was interested in can provide scientifically 
valid results.   The kinds of inferences we should expect that were being 
handwaved by its proponents were even less scientific in their methods than 
"lie detector" testing, "astrology", or "life after death channeling" research.

But TIA was not doing that research.  They were presuming that the answer 
was "it will work" and embarking on engineering in the presumption that 
such a system would provide reliable and valuable information. They had no 
way of knowing it would, and worse, no way of knowing it would not provide 
a cover for the kind of baseless intrepretations that has been shown to be 
the output of analysts serving customers who make it clear they only want 
to hear one kind of answer.

I'm sure TIA would discover a high degree of correlation between Muslim 
religious charity contributions and anti-American sentiment, for 
example.   If I were a Muslim in America I would be pretty interested in 
helping other Muslims who are suffering at the hand of our government 
unnecessarily.  So what would a large contribution to an Muslim charity 
mean (scientifically)?   It would contain little information (measured in 
information theoretic terms).   But in the hands of a skillful and 
prejudiced analyst, it would be easy to use it as the basis of persecution 
that might lead targeted contributors to more and more desperate measures.

The same kind of self-fulfilling science arises in the use of "intelligence 
testing" in such tomes as "The Bell Curve" - ignoring the fact that IQ 
tests were DESIGNED by Binet and colleagues to come up with a measure that 
explained why the victorian upper classes were so much more successful than 
the "poor" who were assumed to be that way because they were stupid, and 
not because they were despised by their wealthier brethren because they 
spoke with a Cockney accent,  for example.  When the correlation between 
the test results and social class was optimized, they decided that the test 
was "valid" and that it measured something real.

Those of us who have been working with computing for a long time have a 
saying, Hiawatha - GIGO.   But the TIA was basically a plan to do garbage 
mining, expecting that there would be gold in the garbage, as if digital 
processing can turn any dross into wonders.

If data mining of such sketchy data as financial transactions wants to 
become respectable research, it first needs to be validated.

Credit card companies do such work, and their experience is 
instructive.   They use financial histories to discover patterns that can 
increase by a few percent the likelihood that a person will be a profitable 
customer.   But looking at how they do this is constructive: they formulate 
a hypothesis (based on some data) and then test that hypothesis by issuing 
credit cards to a valid sample of  that class of people.   *After a year or 
more*, they then determine whether they were right or not.   If they were 
right, they build on that learning by issuing more credit cards to people 
who are similar.   They use control groups, etc.

Whether they are right or not MATTERS to them, because its the difference 
between making or losing a LOT of money.   Even so, they have difficulty 
using the data to make even a small amount of difference in their success 
rate.  It's useful to them because a high error rate is OK, as long as they 
get a slim statistical edge that they wouldn't get otherwise.

Contrast this with the assumption that TIA makes.   TIA assumes that you 
will (among this blizzard of garbage) infer some "fact" with great 
reliability, or even more speculatively, that AI wil "infer" activities 
that you would never have dreamed were happening (the success so far of 
broad domain A.I. inference would not lead one to that conclusion, but 
perhaps *all* such research is classified...)

Then you in your infinite government wisdom decide, for example, to stop 
all airplane flights on some day in June based on the intuition of the 
intelligence officer who believes that computers are such good inference 
engines that you don't have to validate the results.  Or maybe you decide 
instead to authorize a few hundred or a few thousand black bag operations 
in people's houses, and some poor citizen accidentally blows the secret 
police away thinking they are a rapist.  (surely that would "prove" that 
the killer was a bad guy, for having the effrontery to blow away a "good 
guy" like, say, G. Gordon Liddy or Ollie North).

Somehow, I think that before we start assuming that TIA "could have been a 
contenda" we ought to realize that it's probably just as good as all that 
"powerful face recognition" that was gonna save us if we only bought enough 
of it.


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