I just love books/movies whose titles mash up an exotic place and an exotic object. Like The Maltese Falcon and The Eiger Sanction. Some day you will see The Quantico Circuit.
For now, it is the subject of an affidavit filed by a whistle-blower, Babak Pasdar which suggests one of the major US wireless providers has an open backdoor for the Feds to monitor mobile conversations.
I thought it would be interesting to see what algorithms might be used to monitor those millions of conversations. Could Gmail be a good proxy given it parses millions of email and pops up sponsored links?
A quick test of Gmail with the words "Maltese Falcon" pulled up several Kirk Hammett links. Huh? The Metallica guitarist shares last name with the author of the book. "Eiger Sanction" pulled up a Gran Turisomo 5 link - for the Playstation racecar video game. It features an Eiger Nord race. "Quantico Circuit" pulled up one for circuit breakers and one for circuit boards. I would have expected this.
"Al-Qaida" drew a blank.
Darn, I hope our spooks have better algorithms -)
