Legal Commentary

Bush Administration's Data-Mining Programs Criticized

By TChris

There is no evidence that the Bush administration's reliance on data-mining has made the nation safer, but plenty of evidence that the practice endangers our privacy and burdens those who are victimized by the government's inevitable mistakes.

The National Security Agency’s program for wiretapping terror suspects without warrants, the screening of suspicious airline passengers and the Pentagon’s ill-fated Total Information Awareness program, shut down by Congress in 2003 because of privacy concerns, have all relied on aspects of data mining.

But in a 352-page government study released on Tuesday, a committee of the National Research Council warned that successfully using these tools to deter terrorism “will be extremely difficult to achieve” because of legal, technological and logistical problems. It said a haphazard approach to using such tools threatened both Americans’ privacy rights and the country’s legitimate national security needs.

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Even if we could trust the government not to misuse the information it collects (and we can't), we know the administration lacks the competence to use the information wisely. Instead, innocent people suffer because the government's systems for recording the information are unreliable.

The push to accumulate enormous amounts of information has also produced the risk of “a huge number of false leads” that could implicate people with no actual connections to terrorism, the committee said. “More data does not mean better data,” said William J. Perry, the former defense secretary who was co-chairman of the panel, with Charles M. Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering.

You can read more about the report in this press release.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on October 08, 2008 (boomark / email).