Government's underground data mining
"Some of the highlights of the General Accounting Office report, which represents nearly a year of investigation:
• The Department of Homeland Security is creating an Incident Data Mart designed to assemble data from every state, local, and federal police agency and spot possible terrorist activities. The data mart will sort through logs of incidents, defined as any "event involving a law enforcement or government agency for which a log was created, e.g., traffic ticket, drug arrest, or firearm possession."
• Another data mart is across town at the FBI, which has compiled information from its own files, those of other federal agencies, and public data sources such as LexisNexis and court records. The purpose is "to determine unlawful entry" into the U.S. of potential terrorists.
• Four projects at the Defense Intelligence Agency seem to be the most far-reaching of the lot. Their purpose is to mine "data from the intelligence community and Internet searches to identify foreign terrorists or U.S. citizens connected to foreign terrorism activities."
• Even the Department of Education has a so-called Project Strikeback. That's designed to compare names in the department's databases with records supplied by the FBI and search "for anomalies" indicating "terrorist activities."
2 Comments:
i have an idea. why don't these folks use their data mining wall-to-wall marts to find christ? isn't that the purpose of engineering armageddon -- to hasten the return of the savior? wouldn't it be a lot cleaner to just use these fancy tools to just pinpoint the guy (or gal--imagine that!) right now and out him so that s/he can save the world for us and we can continue on our merry way without all the bloodshed?
data-mining, as a propaganda concept, may be more useful as a deterrent to democracy than the data itself. the threat of data-mining acts as our 'conscience': the mere mention of it keeps many of the 'law-abiding' and paranoid out of the internet's cellars.
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