I was wondering exactly how the NSA trained models to detect terrorists, and was surprised by the level of detail in this article. So the NSA performs classification using a Random Forest and about 80 input features? Huh. That actually sounds a little too similar to a Kaggle contest for my liking, but I wasn't expecting that much quasi-technical information anyway.

It seems a little silly to write this whole article based on a few powerpoint slides from years ago. Even as an amateur practitioner, I can see several obvious things that could be changed about the presented methods. I'm sure what the NSA is doing now in this regard is much further along than what was portrayed in those documents. Whether or not they should be doing it is a discussion for others to have. But it is interesting to learn a little more about the details of truly high stakes machine learning.