Dossiers and Customer Courtesy Cards

[John Kelsey]

At 01:46 PM 12/31/02 -0800, Bill Stewart wrote:
...
>The scalability of the problem is much different depending on your goals.
>If you want to sort through the transcriptions of people who
>bought drugs and knives and airline tickets but no luggage
>in an effort to find potential terrorists, that's useless.

>But if you've already got a suspect, like a Green Party member
>who wrote an annoyed letter to the President and threatened to
>tell her Congresscritter in person what a bad President he is,
...

It's worth pointing out that if you can afford to do the computerized part 
of this search for your top 16 suspects today, you'll be able to do it for 
your top thousand suspects in less than ten years, just assuming processing 
and storage gets cheaper at current rates....


--John Kelsey, kelsey.j at ix.netcom.com