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You'd think that in a slowing economy, companies would be trying to hold on to every potential customer. Not DirecTV. The satellite operator is weeding out customers, and it has no problem with fewer people signing up. In a conference call with analysts this week, CEO Chase Carey said the company has a new focus on "quality subscribers" (read: ones with money). It finds these subscribers by analyzing their income, age, home ownership, education and other metrics, Carey said in an earnings call with analysts. (Transcript here). DirecTV puts those customers into different categories to figure out who's valuable and...

Granted, the numbers are way bigger But, what sticks out are the ~400 busiest posters.. Let's have a look at the Top 15: kathyinalaska : 30,156 (83 p.d.) luvw : 25,212 (69 p.d.) nwarizonagranny : 25,126 (69 p.d.) pissant : 23,461 (64 p.d.) mylife : 23,038 (63 p.d.) chicagoconservative2: 20,998 (57 p.d.) cindy : 17,721 (49 p.d.) salvation : 17,653 (48 p.d) sunkenciv : 17,519 (48 p.d.) sandrat : 17,374 (47 p.d.) fuddfan : 17,147 (47 p.d.) clintnsuhks :17,118 (45 p.d.) stephenjohnbanker: 16,233 (44 p.d.) calpernia : 16,073 (44 p.d.) eternalvigilance : 15,319 (42 p.d.) That takes some persistence!

The US and UK governments are developing increasingly sophisticated gadgets to keep individuals under their surveillance. When it comes to technology, the US is determined to stay ahead of the game.... Their goal is to invent a system whereby a facial image can be matched to your gait, your height, your weight and other elements, so a computer will be able to identify instantly who you are. How you walk could be used to identify you in a crowd. "As you walk through a crowd, we'll be able to track you," said Professor Challapa. "These are all things that don't...

From late 2004 until mid-2006, a little-known data-mining computer system developed by the US Department of Homeland Security to hunt terrorists, weapons of mass destruction, and biological weapons sifted through Americans' personal data with little regard for federal privacy laws. Now the $42 million cutting-edge system, designed to process trillions of pieces of data, has been halted and could be canceled pending data-privacy reviews, according to a newly released report to Congress by the DHS's own internal watchdog

WASHINGTON - The FBI is gathering and sorting information about Americans to help search for potential terrorists, insurance cheats and crooked pharmacists, according to a government report obtained Tuesday. Records about identity thefts, real estate transactions, motor vehicle accidents and complaints about Internet drug companies are being searched for common threads to aid law enforcement officials, the Justice Department said in a report to Congress on the agency's data-mining practices. In addition, the report disclosed government plans to build a new database to assess the risk posed by people identified as potential or suspected terrorists. The chairman of the Senate...

In late 2002, Alex Gage sold his share of a well-established polling firm and set about convincing Karl Rove that he had the answer to ensuring President Bush's reelection. His pitch was simple: Take corporate America's love affair with learning everything it can about its customers, and its obsession with carving up the country into smaller and smaller clusters of like-minded consumers, and turn those trends into a political strategy. The Bush majority would be made up of thousands of groups of like-minded voters whom the campaign could reach with precisely the right message on the issues they considered most...

LOS ANGELES - Officials will look into how electronic data mining might help Los Angeles County root out and prevent fraud in public assistance programs. The Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to study the possibility of use of data-mining technology and of training public assistance staff members in fraud prevention techniques. " 'Data mining' is a $10 term for collaboration between agencies and information sharing," said Tony Bell, aide to 5th District Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich. Using data mining, the county would be able to check if applicants for county-administered aid programs are also getting assistance from other programs or...

Having Won a Pulitzer for Exposing Data Mining, Times Now Eager to Do Its Own Data Mining by Keach Hagey May 1st, 2007 Barely a year after their reporters won a Pulitzer prize for exposing data mining of ordinary citizens by a government spy agency, New York Times officials had some exciting news for stockholders last week: The Times company plans to do its own data mining of ordinary citizens, in the name of online profits. The news didn't make everyone all googly-eyed. In fact, some people at the paper's annual stockholders meeting in the New Amsterdam Theatre exchanged confused...

TESTIMONY Subcommittee on Homeland Security (Senate Appropriations Committee) Publication Date: September 14, 2006 Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to testify before the Subcommittee on Homeland Security regarding American and British laws for investigating and detaining suspected terrorists. I am a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. From 2001 to 2003, I served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, where I worked on issues involving national security, foreign relations, and terrorism. My academic writing on these subjects can be found in two books, one published last...

NATIONAL SEX OFFENDER REGISTRY New Hires Data Has Potential for Updating Addresses of Convicted Sex Offenders ... To help track the location of sex offenders, law enforcement officials have turned to other sources of information, such as state departments of motor vehicles and commercial databases. Previous GAO work suggests that the National Directory of New Hires (NDNH) has been useful for the purposes of verifying eligibility for federal benefit programs and collecting debt owed to the federal government, and is a timely source of information.4 The NDNH is a database maintained by the Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) within...

Don Fullman finished off a cinnamon roll and iced tea at the St. Louis Bread Co. in Winchester on Friday morning and talked about some of the things he's looked up recently on the Internet. Bile duct cancer, aneurysms, substance abuse. "If you took that out of context . . . it would look like I'm a wreck and I'm not going to live much longer," said Fullman, a self-described healthy 60-year-old from Ballwin, whose laptop computer sat open on the table. "If that's winding up under my name personally, that's a little scary." Many people might not realize that...

http://www.news.com/ NSA's data mining explained By Declan McCullagh http://marketwatch-cnet.com.com, marketwatch-cnet.com.com/NSAs+data+mining+explained/2100-1028_3-6071780.html Story last modified Sun May 14 16:36:34 PDT 2006 Capitol Hill politicians reacted angrily this week to a new report about how the National Security agency is involved in not merely surveillance of phone calls, but also an extensive data mining program. "We need to know what our government is doing in its activities that spy upon Americans," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat. Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania vowed to hold hearings to get to the bottom of how the NSA's data mining works and whether Americans'...

Does anyone imagine the NSA is interested in what the average American said to his grandmother on the telephone last night? In fact, the NSA is not eavesdropping at all on the average American's conversations. It is collecting records of which phone numbers placed calls to which other numbers and when. No names, addresses or details of conversations are included. The NSA says this anonymous "data mining" allows the agency to study patterns of calling, the better to identify who may be involved with terrorist groups. If Number A places a lot of calls to Number B who likewise calls...

Latest News --EPIC Urges Scrutiny of Proposed Federal Profiling Agency. In a letter (pdf) to a House subcommittee, EPIC urged careful scrutiny of the Department of Homeland Security's proposed Office of Screening Coordination and Operations. This office would oversee vast databases of digital fingerprints and photographs, eye scans and personal information from millions of American citizens and lawful foreign visitors. Homeland Security has announced that the office's operations would be conducted in a manner that safeguards civil liberties, but the agency has not yet explained how it proposes to protect privacy rights or ensure accountability. For more information, visit EPIC's...

May 12, 2006 — Americans by nearly a 2-1 ratio call the surveillance of telephone records an acceptable way for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, expressing broad unconcern even if their own calling patterns are scrutinized. Lending support to the administration's defense of its anti-terrorism intelligence efforts, 63 percent in this ABC News/Washington Post poll say the secret program, disclosed Thursday by USA Today, is justified, while far fewer, 35 percent, call it unjustified. Indeed, 51 percent approve of the way President Bush is handling the protection of privacy rights, while 47 percent disapprove — hardly a...

Earlier this year, Congress launched an investigation into the sale of cell phone records after the FBI and Chicago Police warned that Web-based firms could sell their officers' calling lists to criminals. Now some of the companies under investigation for fraud are telling Congress they have provided personal information to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. On Monday, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., blasted the FBI after learning that Advanced Research Inc. sent Congress a letter saying the firm did work for the bureau. Attorney General Lisa Madigan has sued Advanced Research for allegedly using fraud to obtain Illinois consumers'...

...But this case management and data mining software, developed in the early 1980s by a small Washington D.C. company, Inslaw Inc., had proven itself to be a perfect intelligence tool... Stolen by ruse from its owner, Inslaw Inc., the software was hacked and provided with a "trap door", ... a Trojan Horse hacker’s trick, that enabled the retrieval of information from the foreign intelligence services and banks it had been sold to on behalf of Israeli and U.S. intelligence. Without the knowledge of the software’s owner, and in violation of copyright laws, the PROMIS software was sold to over 40...

HILLARY GURU PLANS DATABASE TO RIVAL DNC; SOROS FINANCED Tue Mar 07 2006 20:38:16 ET A group of well-connected Democrats led by a former top aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton is raising millions of dollars to start a private firm -- that plans to compile huge amounts of data on Americans to identify Democratic voters. The effort by Harold Ickes, a deputy chief of staff in the Clinton White House and an adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., is prompting intense behind-the-scenes debate in Democratic circles, the WASHINGTON POST is planning to report on Wednesday. Officials at the...

The principals in the Able Danger story have filed suit to restrain the Department of Defense from retaliating against Tony Shaffer and to allow these witnesses to retain counsel during the closed hearings that Congress has scheduled into the data-mining program. Mark Zaid, representing Shaffer as well as contractor J. D. Smith, filed the suit on Monday against the DoD, DIA, the Army, and their attorneys in the DC district court. I've copied the text into the extended entry of this post. Most of those who have followed Able Danger will not be surprised by the allegations in the lawsuit....

I've created an Able Danger Podcast blog to generate a podcast feed so folks can subscribe to this feed and easily obtain any Able Danger audio (mp3) files. Here is the podcast feed for the Able Danger podcasts. The link to this feed is easy to find at the top left corner of my main blog, QT Monster, just above the Able Danger blog roll. Folks can subscribe to this podcast feed through iTunes. From the iTunes interface pull down the Advanced menu, click on subscribe to podcast, and in the dialogue box paste the URL for this podcast feed:...