Commercial Data Mining is a scary, scary, scary thing.  Actually it's very cool when you think about the computing power that's brought to bear when such practices are executed. Do you think that your networked life is private and secure ?

Think again.

We're talking about technologies that links more that 30 degrees of separation in peoples lives. These are things that make the NSA wet and Google millionaires .billionairs. The operative and keyword phrases in data mining to remember are:

"Total Information Awareness"

"Non Obvious Relationship Awareness"

"Anonymous Entity Resolution"

"Scalable Social Network Analysis"

"Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery"

To give you an idea how powerful some of these concepts/products/services are, the guys at AT&T get nervous and excited when talking about companies like "Narus".

Here are some links for the 101 class.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/04/non_obvious_rel.html

http://www.narus.com/
http://global.lexisnexis.com/us
http://www.guidestar.org/
http://www.choicepoint.com/
http://www.acxiom.com/
http://www.noraproject.org/description.php