A favoured counter-terrorist measure is collecting data, followed by a statistical analysis, called data mining. Rather simple, in a technical way, is wiretapping of telephone and online contacts. But why did the FBI stop its analysis of phone-call patterns of suspected person's contacts? The idea was to create a "community of interest", thus creating a data base for link analysis, a data mining technique for identifying people who might have slipped through former investigations. As in every discussion, its proponents see link analysis as important tool in predicting and preventing attacks, but there opponents claim about the possibility of misuse, establishing links from terrorists to innocent people. FBI's Mike Kortan says that community of interest data is "no longer being used pending the development of an appropriate oversight and approval policy," and that the technique was used infrequently and was never used for email communications. They stopped the programme because of the large amounts of data that couldn't be handled in a meaningful way. According to NY Times, "the bureau stopped the practice early this year in part because of broader questions raised about its aggressive use of the records demands, which are known as national security letters, officials said".

Considering that important developments like this one arrive with a three-year-delay in Germany (as usual), I predict that our Ministry of Interiour will establish large scale online wiretapping followed by intense data mining. This programme will fail like the one above, of course, but all progresses and advancements in Internet communication of the last ten years will be poisoned by distrust against our gouvernment. Our administration should think this over before imitating failed surveillance programmes. (Source)