Maltego and the science of 'open-source' snooping
Data mining used to be an expensive, somewhat esoteric affair. But as Forbes highlights in a recent article on Maltego, a new "open-source intelligence" tool, new technology "lets just about anybody do the kind of data mining that in the past only fraud investors, government specialists, and hackers typically could do." Should we be worried?
Not really. Maltego doesn't snoop into closed data repositories, but instead mines publicly available data and helps to make inferences and connections between the disparate data sets. The product isn't open source in any way: that's just a clever marketing moniker. It's only "open source" in the sense that it pulls from open data sources and remixes them in interesting ways.
You can download the limited community version (free) from the Maltego Web site. Maltego works on Linux or Windows, but not the Mac. If you want to upgrade to the professional version, it's only $430 for first year and $320 per year thereafter.