Showing posts with label fraud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fraud. Show all posts
Data Mining: Is Credit Card Fraud More Serious Than Terrorism?
Here is an interesting article I found that was written by John Yoo about data mining as it relates to terrorism and how valuable information is being lost in the fight to stop terror because our government isn't willing to allow its use against terrorists.
The U.S. is fighting terror with one hand behind its back by refusing to exploit data-mining tools.
With the arrests last week of 24 alleged terrorists in Britain, the government's legal tools for fighting Al Qaeda are up for debate once again. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggests that Congress emulate Britain's law allowing extended pretrial detention of suspects. Others have observed that British law enforcement can more easily initiate investigations and obtain search warrants than their American counterparts.
But increasing detention time or making warrants easier to come by merely extends an old-fashioned approach to catching terrorists. These tools require individualized suspicion and "probable cause"; police must have evidence of criminal activity in hand. Such methods did not prevent 9/11, and stopping terrorists, who may have no criminal record, requires something more.
Instead of enlarging the scope of standard law enforcement methods, we should be doing what Americans do best--innovating and applying new technology to the problem. Despite what civil libertarians might have you think, that means data mining.
Data mining uses supercomputers to analyze vast amounts of information for suspicious patterns of behavior. It appears to have been an important tool in breaking up the plot in Britain. According to news reports, British authorities searched telephone, e-mail and banking records and uncovered connections between the bombers in Britain and their supporters in Pakistan.
American efforts to develop sophisticated data-mining abilities died early in 2003, when criticism killed the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program. The idea was to develop mining techniques to compare information in government and commercial databases. Civil libertarians engaged in a scare campaign representing the TIA as an unchecked Big Brother. Congress cut off all funding for the program. It was a political defeat early in the war on terrorism, and the president retreated as fast as he could.
But that was a dangerous overreaction. Corporations already use data mining to detect consumer fraud and to market products such as credit cards and magazine subscriptions. Financial companies analyze patterns that might indicate a stolen credit card or bank account number. Why should the government be barred from using similar tools on similar databases to protect the country from attack? Data mining is nothing but an ordinary, ubiquitous feature of technology today.
In fact, the government also already uses modest forms of data mining. In response to drug cartels and organized crime, federal authorities are allowed to search banking records for signs of money laundering. Such analysis has already paid off in the war against terror by identifying groups that funnel funds to extremist organizations.
What about privacy concerns? The Supreme Court has found that the information in business records does not merit 4th Amendment protection because the consumer has already voluntarily turned over the information to a third party.
Still, civil libertarians object to data mining because most of the records and communications that would be searched are innocent, and there is no suspicion of criminal activity attached to any individual whose records may be mined. When the National Security Agency was discovered in May to be looking at telephone billing information on millions of calls within the United States, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) railed at a hearing: "Are you telling me tens of millions of Americans are involved with Al Qaeda?"
But it's important to remember that data mining is not the same thing as gathering the information in the first place. The NSA's program of looking at billing information, for example, doesn't raise the same constitutional issues as its other recently revealed program: warrantless wiretaps. There, the content of communications was captured. A federal trial judge in Detroit enjoined such surveillance Thursday, in a decision already on appeal.
Data mining could be controlled and developed so that it protects us from terror and maintains our privacy. Analysis could be limited to data already turned over to third parties. Searches could be performed initially by computer; only after a certain level of suspicious activity had been registered would an intelligence or law enforcement officer be allowed to see the results. A warrant could still be required to investigate the content of communications or the purpose of purchases.
Right now, we're fighting terror with one hand behind our back by refusing to exploit data-mining tools. London's success should serve notice that we must use our technological sophistication and reject the sky-is-falling claims of the extreme civil libertarians.
H/T goes to American Enterprise Institute For Public Policy Research
Dr. Philip Lloyd Says the IPCC Has Lost 'Authority' on Climate Change
Here is an interesting article I found via Newsmax in my inbox. Here is a scientist who disputes the legitimacy of the IPCC and believes that the IPCC is no longer an authority on climate change. And, this was written before climategate.
Prof Bruce Hewitson (Uninformed vitriol, November 19) pontificates on Andrew Kenny’s assessment (Ideology and money drive global-warming religion, November 16). Unfortunately for him, there has been a reformation. The time for pontification is over. The critics must be answered. Instead Prof Hewitson stood in his pulpit and preached the gospel according to St IPCC.
He says he was a l ead a uthor for the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). That is not material — I was a c o-ordinating l ead a uthor, but it gives me no mantle of infallibility. Instead, it gave me insight into the flaws behind the whole process.
The IPCC claims that it has thousands of scientists and almost as many reviewers of the scientists' work to produce their reports. There are two problems, however. In the scientific world I move in, “review” means that your work is scrutinised by several independent, anonymous reviewers chosen by the editor.
However, when I entered the IPCC world, the reviewers were there at the worktable, criticising our drafts, and finally meeting with all us c o-ordinators and many of the IPCC functionaries in a draftfest.
The product was not reviewed in the accepted sense of the word — there was no independence of review, and the reviewers were anything but anonymous. The result is not scientific.
The second problem is that the technical publication is not completed by the time the IPCC reports. Instead, it produces a Summary for Policy Makers. Writing the s ummary involves the co-ordinators, the reviewers and the IPCC functionaries as before, and also various chairmen.
The s ummary goes out in a blaze of publicity, but there is no means of checking whether it represents what the scientists actually said, because the scientific report isn’t published for another four months or more.
In the Fourth Assessment, the s ummary was quietly replaced several months after it was first published because some scientists who were involved complained of misrepresentation.
In the early years of the IPCC, there was a slightly different process. The Summary for Policy Makers and the scientific reports were issued at the same time. In those years, however, the Summary for Policy Makers bore a warning that it was the last current word on the subject, whereas the scientific reports were correctly identified as being subject to continuing development.
Someone smelled a rat about the “last word” story, so the process was changed, and now the s ummary is issued with no means of checking.
It isn’t necessary to list all the changes I have identified between what the scientists actually said and what the policy makers who wrote the Summary for Policy Makers said they said. The process is so flawed that the result is tantamount to fraud. As an authority, the IPCC should be consigned to the scrapheap without delay.
Dr Philip Lloyd Pr Eng
MD: Industrial and Petrochemical Consultant
H/T goes to BusinessDay
Prof Bruce Hewitson (Uninformed vitriol, November 19) pontificates on Andrew Kenny’s assessment (Ideology and money drive global-warming religion, November 16). Unfortunately for him, there has been a reformation. The time for pontification is over. The critics must be answered. Instead Prof Hewitson stood in his pulpit and preached the gospel according to St IPCC.
He says he was a l ead a uthor for the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). That is not material — I was a c o-ordinating l ead a uthor, but it gives me no mantle of infallibility. Instead, it gave me insight into the flaws behind the whole process.
The IPCC claims that it has thousands of scientists and almost as many reviewers of the scientists' work to produce their reports. There are two problems, however. In the scientific world I move in, “review” means that your work is scrutinised by several independent, anonymous reviewers chosen by the editor.
However, when I entered the IPCC world, the reviewers were there at the worktable, criticising our drafts, and finally meeting with all us c o-ordinators and many of the IPCC functionaries in a draftfest.
The product was not reviewed in the accepted sense of the word — there was no independence of review, and the reviewers were anything but anonymous. The result is not scientific.
The second problem is that the technical publication is not completed by the time the IPCC reports. Instead, it produces a Summary for Policy Makers. Writing the s ummary involves the co-ordinators, the reviewers and the IPCC functionaries as before, and also various chairmen.
The s ummary goes out in a blaze of publicity, but there is no means of checking whether it represents what the scientists actually said, because the scientific report isn’t published for another four months or more.
In the Fourth Assessment, the s ummary was quietly replaced several months after it was first published because some scientists who were involved complained of misrepresentation.
In the early years of the IPCC, there was a slightly different process. The Summary for Policy Makers and the scientific reports were issued at the same time. In those years, however, the Summary for Policy Makers bore a warning that it was the last current word on the subject, whereas the scientific reports were correctly identified as being subject to continuing development.
Someone smelled a rat about the “last word” story, so the process was changed, and now the s ummary is issued with no means of checking.
It isn’t necessary to list all the changes I have identified between what the scientists actually said and what the policy makers who wrote the Summary for Policy Makers said they said. The process is so flawed that the result is tantamount to fraud. As an authority, the IPCC should be consigned to the scrapheap without delay.
Dr Philip Lloyd Pr Eng
MD: Industrial and Petrochemical Consultant
H/T goes to BusinessDay
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