This angle regarding the latest smokescreen put out by those lovely folks at the WH helps me sleep at night. The government wouldn't know what to do with all those friggin phone numbers anyway. Seriously, does anyone think they are that competent? I mean, think about it..they can't find Bin Laden even though most likely he is dragging a fucking kidney dialysis machine around with him in his mountain hideaway. They are a slightly more modernized, technologically advanced version of the keystone cops. Plus they keep getting caught with their pants down..sometimes literally...so the players keep changing like a high school football team.
Another way to look at it is, if that one doesn't make you warm and fuzzy try this one on for size:
Its all about mathematics. Its all about crunching the numbers. But without other information to enter into the equation, all those friggin numbers can only produce so much information. Take for example, the Enron debacle. As this article points out in the opinion section of the NYT: "But without additional data, its reach is limited: as any mathematician will admit, even when you know everyone in the graph is a terrorist, it doesn't directly portray information about the order or hierarchy of the cell. Social network researchers look instead for graph features like "centrality": they try to identify nodes that are connected to a lot of other nodes, like spokes around the hub of a bicycle wheel.
But this isn't as helpful as you might imagine. First, the "central player" — the person with the most spokes — might not be as important as the hub metaphor suggests. For example, Jafar Adibi, an information scientist at the University of Southern California, analyzed e-mail traffic among Enron employees before the company collapsed. He found that if you naïvely analyzed the resulting graph, you could conclude that one of the "central" players was Ken Lay's ... secretary."
And then..if that didn't make you chuckle..or,god forbid cry..our mathematician brings up the 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon theory..er game.
Since there is little we, as citizens can do about the heinous crimes most recently surfacing by those pencil-dicked guys in DC, I figured it was my job to try to make you relax..and hope that a whole lotta senators,congressmen and women and god knows those idiots in the WH are calling people that they dont want ANYONE to know about and they will bitchslap those nimrods good and stop this trampling of our rights.
