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"He said that if the system—which theoretically would analyze relationships among transactions such as credit card or airline ticket purchases—were applied to the entire population, almost as many people would incorrectly be identified as terror plotters as would be correctly fingered.

If it were that good, it would be fantastic. The innocent could easily be eliminated by a few discrete inquiries.

But the likely results are thousands of false positives, without a single correct hit, causing the FBI to waste hundreds of thousands of hours investigating innocent people.

I speak here as a programmer, not a civil libertarian.

There is some merit to this idea, although everything said about its potential for becoming a civil liberties nightmare is true.

Several such systems exist today, and to some degree they work. If someone were to steal your credit card without your knowledge, by the second or third transaction -- and maybe even the first -- a neural net system that has been watching you for a long time would likely notice "out of character behavior" for you and bring these transactions to the attention of a human. This is in place today; it watches over an incredibly large data stream of everyday credit card transactions that no human -- or even team of humans -- could keep up with.

There is nobody 'spying on you' here, it is just a machine, which promptly forgets 99.999% of what it looks at. It's really watching for aggregates and patterns. Could someone who works at the vendor that provides this system peek at what you do? Yes, but there is such a torrent of the stuff that you're basically anonymous in there.

The point is, this is not "profiling." There is no profile of what a credit card fraudster looks like. The expectation is that within this huge data stream of real-time credit card transaction data, all but a minuscule number of transactions are legitimate. What's more, people don't like to be hassled, so the system has to have a very low "false positive" rate, or the banks won't use it. In spite of those challenges, the damned thing works, and works pretty well.

Even though it may sound like pie-in-the-sky to examine a huge data stream to find one bad guy in a sea of good ones, this problem is solvable... it has been solved in some areas.

This debate is better carried on in terms of the privacy threats and the potential for abuse, than over speculative claims that it "won't work." It may very well work.

Levy echoed the concerns of many critics that Poindexter shouldn’t be in charge of such a potentially sensitive national security tool, given his history of making false public statements. “The concern is not that [Poindexter] is not the right man for the job. The problem is that he may be the right man,” Levy said.

I don't care if Laura Bush is the first one in charge - no matter how trustworthy or innocuous the first, second, third or fourth, etc., person in charge would be, at some point in time you'd get someone that would've made a good Stasi or KGB head. And all of that wonderful data on every transaction by every person would be available for use against political opponents. Ordinary people would be left alone - for a while. The first to have the choice between resigning and having some scandal spilled all over the public airwaves will be those in a position to oppose the head of this Big Brother-like agency. When power has been consolidated within that particular administration by our "hero," those in the opposition party will get the same treatment. Over time, laws will be passed at the very private behest of this guy that will totally gut our liberties. Unless assassinated, this guy will make Hoover look like some fruitcake in a tutu (oh, damn, Hoover did that to himself), and will, more seriously, have a real shot at becoming our Stalin or Hussein.

The Founding Fathers were so right to fear the power of a central government. They were incredibly wise to limit the power of the Fedgov, split the power three ways, specifically forbid the Fedgov from trampling on certain key rights, and to further specifically provide that the populace should be armed without interference from the Fedgov - just in case, mind you. Yet our parents, us and our children will throw it all away - just watch.