[Austrian Privacy-Protection Group:]Datamining the NSA

[Kellanved]

"With official permission from the data protection committee in the Austrian Office of the Federal Chancellor, quintessence (an association for the re-establishment of information civil rights) has data mined an extensive mailing list related to the Biometric Consortium, which is part of the NSA. Heise (Google translation) writes that a quintessenz activist was able to get access to the mailing list through social engineering, and used a PHP script to extract 1GB worth of data. Quintessenz is using the open source tool Weka for data mining, and Kea for text mining. The first chapter of the gathered information is available online."
...
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/04/1346234


Original(German)Article: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/result.xhtml?url=/newsticker/meldung/57056

Results Page (English):
http://www.quintessenz.at/cgi-bin/index?id=000100003123

[Igel]

1. They hacked the listserv,

and got the e-mail addresses of the people that post to their discussion group. Probably the text of the postings.

http://www.biometrics.org/ isn't part of the NSA, but something they helped launch, apparently. Nothing much secret, and I suspect that with a decent reason I could probably get granted posting rights.

Why somebody gave them official permission to do so is a mystery to me.

Edited to add: It probably gives them something interesting to do on a Saturday night, however.

[bemildred]

2. Sounded like babbling fools to me. nt

[Igel]

3. Yeah, but I've exceeded my quota of insulting posts for the day.

Have to try to be nice ... at least until midnight.

[bemildred]

4. That is not an insult. Just stating the objective facts as I see them.

An insult would be more creative.

[Igel]

5. Ah. Not only have I exceeded my quota of insults,

I also obviously stand corrected.

Time for down-time.

[bemildred]

6. No offense intended, sleep well. nt