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Government data mining raises privacy concerns
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January 17, 2003 (Computerworld) -- Lawmakers, privacy groups and national security experts are questioning the soundness of several high-tech homeland security projects, based on serious concerns about the impact the projects could have on fundamental civil liberties.
All of the projects in question stem directly from efforts to improve domestic intelligence collection and the analysis of terrorist threats within the U.S. Several that involve the use of sophisticated data mining tools raise the potential for electronic tracking of the daily activities of law-abiding citizens.
In a letter sent to U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft last week, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked the Department of Justice to explain the extent to which data mining tools are being used to fight the war on terrorism at home. Specifically, Leahy expressed concern about the mining of commercial transaction data.
"These concerns include the specter of excessive government surveillance that may intrude on important privacy interests and chill the exercise of First Amendment-protected speech and associated rights," Leahy said in the letter, which was also signed by Sens. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.). In addition, the senators argued that while data mining errors in business may result in misdirected marketing efforts, mistakes in the use of data mining to track suspected terrorists could mean "devastating consequences for mistakenly targeted Americans."
The letter from Leahy comes amid a backdrop of growing controversy around the Pentagon's so-called Total Information Awareness (TIA) program. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) started the TIA project a year ago as part of a broader effort to research ways to use IT to uncover and preempt terrorist attacks. The project uses IT to conduct human analysis and pattern recognition from data obtained through commercial transactions such as credit card purchases and telephone calls.
"TIA is intended, according to Department of Defense officials, to generate tools for monitoring the daily personal transactions by Americans and others, including tracking the use of passports, driver's licenses, credit cards, airline tickets, and rental cars," Leahy wrote. One TIA software tool, code-named Genoa, may have already been delivered by DARPA to the Justice Department, Leahy said. As a result, Leahy has asked for a status report on all TIA software projects, including Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery, a previously unknown tool called Genisys and a program called the Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization, or TIDES.
Former Virginia Gov. James S. Gilmore III, speaking this week at a conference in Washington that was sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, expressed concerns about the potential for excessive data mining. He has also raised questions about another homeland security recommendation made to the president and Congress by a panel of experts that he leads.
Gilmore, chairman of the Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction, said on Dec. 16 that the panel's call for an independent intelligence agency to collect and analyze intelligence on domestic terrorism threats could be viewed by some Americans as the formation of a "secret police."
"We don't want to create anything like that," Gilmore said. "I, for one, would rather build upon the existing structures of the [FBI], but the commission doesn't feel that way. The commission believes that you have to have a new organization with a different culture" separate from the FBI and the CIA.
"We believe that this new agency must adhere to ... all of the restrictions that have been placed upon intelligence organizations, so that we can make sure that we are focusing on enemies here in the country and not upon regular Americans," said Gilmore. "Protecting this democracy and the individual freedoms of the American people is paramount to achieving ultimate victory in this conflict. It's the whole ballgame."
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