Big Data versus Dominique Strauss-Kahn

"Whoa! Down, boy, down, Fido," warned Barack Obama, concerned that the energetic
Dominique Strauss-Kahn was about to launch himself at the First Lady and hump her
shin right there in the Blue Room. "Or it'll be time for that trip to the vet we talked about."

There's been a lot of speculating about scenarios involving electronic spying recently (and I add to the irresponsible speculation in my upcoming Taki's Magazine article). So, let's consider this scenario.

Imagine that it's early 2011 and you are concerned that French Socialist warhorse Dominique Strauss-Kahn might get elected president of France next year. Perhaps you don't think that's in the interest of the international financial community or America or Nicolas Sarkozy or whatever. 

If you had access to all of DSK's electronic communications, what kind of data mining algorithm would you craft to ferret out DKS's greatest vulnerability? How could you best sift through terabytes of data to find DSK's Achilles heel?

Well, you wouldn't. You'd just call up your press secretary and ask, "What's the gossip about DSK?"

And he'd reply, "He can't keep his hands off the women. Fashion models, wives, maids, whores, nuns -- he's out of control, a real life Pepe Le Pew."

"So, just to toss a purely hypothetical logical conception out there, if an extremely expensive lady of the evening were to, say -"

"You are overthinking this, Monsieur President. To entrap DSK, there's no need for a large budget."

The more general point is that a lot of the information that the public assumes must be secret is actually common knowledge among the tiny percentage of people who are paying attention. To find out about it, you often just have to ask.