Last week, there was an op-ed piece in the New York Times entitled "The N.S.A.'s Math Problem" written by Jonathan David Farley, who is a science fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford.
Interesting reading, and good to see social networking analysis pop up again, as well as the the fun world of graph theory, Stanley Milgram, centrality, the strength of weak ties, concept lattices, and Cat Stevens (that was an especially nice touch).
While it's an interesting read, I have to agree with James Joyner, over at the blog "Outside the Beltway" and his analysis and commentary on the op-ed piece. Read the full commentary there (seriously, very insightful and cutting), but the main points are that Jonathan David Farley (the writer of the original article) is inferring items, largely based on the reporting of USA Today (that bastion of in-depth journalism), and is taking these "facts" at face-value. That social network analysis (SNA) is the one and only tool at the disposal of the NSA, and that there is only one way to use SNA, and that is to find the "central players" (or centrality in SNA terms, as he mentions) - once finding those central players, the NSA supposedly goes in, guns blazing, and takes out the trash.
Oy vey - SNA has a range of tools, no doubt the NSA (hmm, same three letters... I sense a conspiracy) has a number of tools at their disposal, including human intelligence agents who more thoroughly "vet" the information before acting on it.
While I found the op-ed piece to be annoyingly "science-lite" (or logically-lite perhaps), and am willing to give the NSA a bit more credit for their capabilities, I am appalled at this whole fiasco - the NSA should never have been given the go-ahead to do any of this, which is a gigantic political mess which I'm not going to step into - and others are plowing that field quite nicely. When is the next election though? Tick tock.
Still, the rise of mathematics and applications to business (and "intelligence" work) continues to move along, and not just the "quant" applications that MBAs so love to employ.
Technorati Tags: dan_keldsen, NSA, SNA, social_network_analysis, beyond_the_beltway, nytimes
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