Tell weldon to stay away from Ft marcy park!!!
“Okay, well, this is pretty sensitive stuff,” began Silvari. “Not the theory, but what we’re going to do with it. This is not to leave this room, okay? The fact is we’re already making our next lists from our own predictive programs.
“These were originally dreamed up on Madison Avenue to tell advertisers what people wanted, before they even know it. It works so well, it’s almost scary! Computers mine all of the data bases you can imagine, and then some. They check your credit card purchases back for years, they see where you’ve lived and where you go on vacation, the kind of car you buy, the food you eat--ten thousand things that add up to ‘you’. Then they compare that ‘you’ to everybody else, and then they see what folks like ‘you’ just bought.
“Did you ever call a catalog company to make an order, and at the end they ask if you want to hear their list of ‘specials’? Their computer just cranked out the list of specials it thinks you’ll want. Before data mining and predictive programs, they used to average about a ten percent hit-rate on the ‘specials’. Now they get over 80% sales! Think about it; the computer can guess what you’ll want to buy next, 80% of the time!
“Everybody who found out about this got very excited, as you can imagine. CIA, FBI, NSA, everybody. Then after 9-11, there was a big push to use the predictive programs for catching Muslim terrorists, to find the sleepers by their credit cards, their movements, memberships, phone usage patterns, everything. 'Brilliant' data mining at its finest: that’s the essence of the 'Terrorist Information Awareness' program. And let me tell you, it works. They get a lot of false hits, but they catch a lot of bad guys with it too. A lot of them, more than are ever reported in the media.
“Anyway, Malvone got access to some of the predictive program algorithms, and my number one computer geek Charles changed the parameters. Now we can tap into the TIA program and use it for finding our own home-grown terrorists, based on the ones we’ve already busted and jailed over the years. The program looks at the vehicles they drive, the magazines they read, the websites they surf…and of course their credit cards. With gun nuts that’s especially useful, because they buy so much from catalogs and on the internet. I mean, if somebody ordered five thousand rounds of AK-47 ammo in 1999, it’s pretty obvious what kind of weapons he has!
“So we’ll just aim our own modified version of the predictive program at a zip code or a town, and it’ll spit out the most dangerous right wing nut jobs. It’ll bird-dog the next Shiffletts or McVeighs, the ones who are really out on the edge. So that’s where our next list of targets is going to come from: from our own in-house predictive programs.
"And since we’re not in the business of building court cases, it doesn’t really matter if they’ve technically broken the law yet or not. And anyway, with these gun nuts, you can always find something! You know, a gun they bought in one jurisdiction that they failed to register properly when they moved somewhere else, or a barrel that’s too long or too short… “And no matter what happens to the guy, you can always make it a ‘gun accident’ or a ‘premature bomb’, and there’ll be enough incriminating evidence in his house to make it fly in the press. So that part’s easy. But if by some miracle a guy on the list actually turns out to be squeaky clean, well, we still have the militia ‘drop guns’ that Malvone gave us, just in case...”
The STU Team leaders were silent, absorbing the meaning of what they’d just heard. The cutting-edge STU Team was going to smoke out the most dangerous gun nuts and Constitution fanatics using an advanced computer program, and the TIA data bases. This was just about as “proactive” as it could get! No more waiting around until after the bomb went off, or the politician was assassinated.
“Way cool,” said Tim Jaeger.
“I like it. I really like it,” said Michael Shanks.