The director, Kevin Connor, talked about what the group did, before leading a sort of walk through on how they approach an issue. They take an issue, list the power brokers involved, and start to find relationships between them to see who and how can be leveraged into accomplishing a change. One example they did was identify the Center for Sustainable Shale Development(fracking), allegedly an industry/environmentalist group for fracking, as a sham. PAI investigated all of the environmental groups involved and found they were funded by the Heinz Foundation, which was controlled by natural gas directors. The report the produced ended up causing three people, including the president of the Heinz Foundation, to resign and pretty much ended the CSSD. Link
The example we ran through was with Buffalo Public Schools, which ended up getting derailed into pretty pointless discussion.
One of their main tools is a site called Little Sis. It's kind of a database of important people to list their connections, donations they've made and recieved, organizations they're in etc, and can dynamically generate charts showing the relationships between different people. It was really an awesome tool, and was basically developed by Kevin and another developer out of NYC. Apparently it's all PHP and MySQL now, but they're working to migrate it over to Ruby. I wonder if they ever considered open sourcing something like this, it looked powerful.
Unfortunately the NFC features require access to the secure element on the SIM, which they use to encrypt the payment information from what I can tell [link=http://www.smartcardalliance.org/pages/publications-nfc-frequently-asked-questions#7]Link[/link]. Since it's on the SIM the carrier controls access to it. I'm not sure what carriers allow access to it, but for at least AT&T they block Google Wallet's access and only allow their competing ISIS app to use it (which doesn't have half the features or card support that Google does.
I am guessing here, but I think if you have an open Google phone + a Google voice account operating over wifi, you can use those NFC features. I have seen them being used.
When you have infinite datasets, each of them petabytes or higher in size, classification and prediction algorithms become incredibly precise. There are no crippling distributional or parametric assumptions you need to make for your models because the real distribution of the data is available to you without any restrictions (I am drooling at this thought and (e:Paul) can understand why. ;))
If I were take a guess, it's not just the words, it's the nature of the words. I would speculate about the usage of the words "hookers" and "blow", the contexts in which they most occur, the demographic that is most likely to use these particular words, the geographical region they arose from (proximity to state/international borders etc).. the list of information extraction inferences are fascinating and endless. Put those all together, and its a flag serious enough to trigger that email.
Statistics is the most fascinating subject on the planet. :)
Google Wallet hooks up to your bank account through ACH I think. I almost never have cash, and since there's no transaction fee for bank transfers I can transfer money right out of my account to someone else's Wallet. They can either keep it in their wallet or transfer it into their bank account!
There's a bunch of other crazy awesome features it's supposed to do like NFC tap-to-pay with whatever credit cards you enter in your phone, but I don't think there is a carrier that allows it in the US.
I'm just curious as to why you would use google wallet to pay someone back? So when you pay someone what do they do with the virtual money? It is funny that they flagged you for this!
I'm sure it is and I understand why it's monitored, and that it's likely never even come close to being looked at by a human . I just think it's crazy that they even monitor the memos automatically. Would someone actually using google wallet for drugs/prostitution really put it in the memo? It seems like the signal to noise ratio for something like that would be ridiculous!
Maybe not though, I mean who else is better at data mining than google?
Money laundering and sex/drug trafficking is more prevalent than you think. For a free service, it's a massive nightmare to protect its interests in the face of >1 Billion users in the system. That is ~ 1/8th of the population on the planet. Most of this usage is very minimally monitored and that too by predictive/statistical machine-learning anonymized algorithms.
Think of how the govt. or the "Rockstar" consortium can use that to shut Google down and you will start to understand why this is so necessary.