The irony of cases like this is that the restrictions may fall proactively on the “usual suspects” — from a certain point of view — and never the right ones. They’ll fix the roulette wheels so that they all play the same statistical way. That way nobody notices the bent ones.

You mean like how violent crime is used as an excuse to restrict gun ownership among law-abiding citizens? Or (better yet) how corrpution by existing elected officials is used as an excuse to make fund raising harder for their future challengers?

One way to analyze large datasets with many possible connections is to prune out the irrelevant connections. So, we could analyze political datapoins by connecting them with “proposed changes” and those doing the proposing. Makes a nice triangle, three points (data, person, proposed change) and three connections. Then we can simply delete all the triangles were the same person always proposes the same solution regardless of the datapoint. Those are irrelevant to any rational discussion because it’s just someone looking for excuses to do what they want. Thus, the Brady Campaign would be eliminated from public discussion because everything is a reason to restrict gun ownership. The current AGW crowd would go too, since both increased and decreased temperatures are “proof” of a looming eco-disaster. Actually, most of the left would be eliminated from discussion because it’s all outcome based thinking.

A crisis is certainly a terrible thing to waste.

Now, on the one hand, this is an onion-esque proposal. We don’t need fancy graphs and data manipulation to know that whatever Barney Frank proposes is somehow crooked, even if we can’t quite see the corruption. But obviously not everybody sees that quite so easily. Maybe a visualization technique that makes it easier for people to see the specious reasoning might help open enough eyes to matter.

Speaking of visualization or presentation, I looked at discoverthenetworks.org and, while happy that someone is doing this, I’m underwhelmed by the presentation.