A post on the Washington DC/Metro Area Flickr users group has touched a nerve with readers of DCist, who are sharing stories of similar experiences in the comments.
D.C. area photographer “Yonas,” taking pictures in the Gallery Place Metro station, caught the eye of Metro Police who found it suspicious. They demanded identification and subjected the photographer to questioning.
This offends me about five different ways, but it provides a good opportunity to illustrate how suspicion is properly generated — and, in this case, how it is not properly generated — using patterns. The same concepts apply to the cop on the beat and the high-tech search through data.
I testified to a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on data mining earlier this year regarding searches for terrorists and terrorism planning:
Read the rest of this post →Pattern analysis is looking for a pattern in data that has two characteristics: (1) It is consistent with bad behavior, such as terrorism planning or crime; and (2) it is inconsistent with innocent behavior.