The recent leaks about the NSA’s use data mining and predictive analytics has certainly raised awareness of our field and has resulted in hours of discussions with family, relatives, friends and reporters about what predictive analytics can (and can’t) do with phone records, emails, chat messages, and other structured and unstructured data. Eric Siegel and I have been interviewed on multiple occasions to address this issue from a Predictive Analytics perspective, and in case, in the same article: “What the NSA can’t do with your data (probably)”, http://fcw.com/articles/2013/06/12/nsa-risk-assessment.aspx. Part of my goal in these conversations has been to