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)
I don’t know the mechanisms, but what I am saying is that they already had a control to test the accuracy of the methods - Able Danger’s red flag of the Stanford-Perry-Chinese military connection. They knew the technology had pinpointed a real threat. But because that threat was THEM, they wanted everything about Able Danger ended.
I think you’re missing the larger point, though. There were clues that a diligent government should have paid attention to - both on Perry and on AQ. Those clues were suppressed and the people who were desperately trying to warn of impending danger on AQ were gagged and suppressed because if Able Danger was treated as credible, it could lead people to investigate our OWN GOVERNMENT - and specifically our own Secretary of Defense, who WAS BREAKING LAWS BY ARMING OUR ENEMIES. China’s satellite capabilities in asymmetric warfare go directly to the treason by OUR OWN SECRETARY OF DEFENSE.
Look at that and try telling me that our government would never conspire to do something bad and then cover it up by silencing the people talking about the clues.
Do you assume that Fast and Furious never happened because it would have to be a government conspiracy?