Interesting article over on the Seattle Times about the new initiative that’s just been announced, about the NSA tracking phone calls. Bush is reassuring us that they are “not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans.” But that they are just looking at who’s calling who. And they’re wrapping it in the language of social-networking applications - all the rage online nowadays:

If the National Security Agency (NSA) is indeed amassing a colossal database of Americans’ phone records, one way to use all that information is in “social-network analysis,” a data-mining method that aims to expose previously invisible connections among people.

Social-network analysis has gained prominence in business and intelligence circles under the belief that it can yield extraordinary insights, such as the fact that people in disparate organizations have common acquaintances. Companies can buy social-networking software to help determine who has the best connections for a particular sales pitch.

In other words, it’s the National Security Agency’s version of MySpace. Which makes me wonder: does Al Qaida have a MySpace account? If so, they ought to just use that to harvest their friends list and leave the rest of us the hell alone.

Also interesting is this out of context and unexplained quote from Bruce Schneier, a computer security expert, who explains “Who you’re talking to often matters much more than what you’re saying.” Why is that? Don’t they care what we’re saying? Don’t they want to listen to all the bad things we’re saying about them? Or do they just get tired of hearing about it?

Or is it something even more insidious: tentative proof that what we think and say doesn’t actually amount to a hill of beans to them. It only matters what we do in the world. Maybe they don’t even believe that we have minds or consciousness in the first place. I honestly wouldn’t be too surprised.

UPDATE!

Another fun they could use this data has to do with physical locations. You create a big networked list of people who called each other and when. They you correlate that data to known locations of either landlines, or of proximity to cell phone towers. You end up with a series of time lapse videos showing how all of these people moved about the country and world, coming together and apart over time. What fun!