The NSA Admits It Analyzes More People's Data Than Previously Revealed
This is even worse than it seems. A "hop" can go both ways. So if a terror suspect calls Comcast's main 800 number (or any other high volume number) they can track everyone who ever called that number. And obviously they have to deal with the fact that many people have multiple numbers and treat them as a single node. Three hops from a few thousand suspected terrorists each with multiple phone numbers might include a large fraction of the US population.Not sure how this could possibly be helpful in an investigation if everyone is a suspect. At some point you have to narrow it down.Edit: Apparently there are 875,000 names in the "Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment" (TIDE) [1]So if each of those suspects can be connected to 20 people (hop 1 - 20 people) and each those people can be connected to an additional 20 people (hop 2 - 400 people) and connected again to 21 more (hop 3 - 8,000 people) you could reach the entire world's population.875,000 x 8,000 = 7 billion[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/03/us-usa-security-da...