So of course we're all shocked by the Vice-president, by the NSA going after private phone records, and by the phone companies for complying with a request for records. But all issues of propriety, legality and constitutionality aside, are any Candleblog readers familiar w/ social ring networks? I recall 20 years ago a paper on the subject about how InterPol used the theory to map relationships between people. It worked like this: collect thousands of one-on-one connections ("relationships") and store in a database. For example:

danz has a strong relationship w/ bsimmon
bsimmon has a strong relationship w/ cresmer
cresmer has a strong relationship w/ pfreyne
etc.

Then, when a crime is committed by pfreyne, and suspects are identified, their primary and secondary relationships can be queried and likely groups or 'rings' of individuals can be inferred... so danz might get a phonecall asking what he knows about the crime or about pfreyne, etc..

This is an exceptionally powerful method when the database has millions of connections, and by collecting records of the kind "A-called-B", and storing only phone-numbers or other unique tags and w/out even knowing the nature of the communication, HUGE strides in identifying rings and 'connecting the dots' can be made.

Again, forget questions of legality. the question i'm asking is: does anyone know of a resource for reading up on this or what the theory is called? i googled all morning and didn't make headway because most of it is in the context of computer networks or lattice models of quantized energy transport whereas the current NSA model is in the application to social networks.