Have you seen David Horowitz’s site that shows connections between people and places? That’s the kind of data mining we’re talking about here. Able Danger found that there was a hub of activity that connected Stanford, the Chinese military, and SecDef Perry. The military used that to say that the Able Danger intel was quackery. But what I am saying is that SecDef Perry knew it was NOT quackery. He knew it was dead-accurate in finding suspicious connections, because he knew his company was introduced to the Chinese military leader’s wife through a mutual contact at Stanford. Able Danger was right over the target on that one, and the SecDef knew it. So they dismantled Able Danger and destroyed its data (though the people involved saved the data on their own, IIRC)
They knew Able Danger was trustworthy and if they had cared more about national security than about covering their own criminal arses they would have taken Able Danger’s warnings about the Brooklyn Al Qaeda cell very, very seriously.
But they didn’t. And that is my point. They covered their own criminal arses. Was that a “conspiracy”, palmer? Do you think arse-covering is a rare occurrence in government, or an automatic occurrence when whistle-blowers are ridiculed or otherwise silenced because they are “kooks”?
No, that doesn't make a bit of sense. Let's say there are a million professors maybe who are connected to 10 million people. The SecDef would have first degree connections to a dozen or two. Let's say one of those connections was also connected first degree to the Chinese leader's wife. First, how does A.D. spit out only the interesting connections, not the thousands of others (e.g. potential terrorists it is putatively looking for)? Second how does A.D. know that the SecDef would use the connection to introduce his company to the Chinese leader's wife? There are lots of other people with first degree connections to professors who are connected first degree to China who didn't introduce their companies.
Basically you are describing a giant GIGO system with huge false positive outputs that would never be taken seriously about any true positive. The G part of the system is the fact that it knows about all the friendships or other first degree connections between all the people like the SecDef and all the professors in the US. Such data would be chock full of garbage (false leads, wrong info, wrong names, etc)