Lawmakers Ordered Probe Of Data Mining Project

Just what privacy protections does the U.S. government’s ‘data mining’ efforts  provide?Lawmakers Ordered Probe Of Data-Mining ProjectBy Cliff Montgomery – Jan. 17th, 2007Congressional appropriators ordered the inspector general of the land Security Department (DHS) to investigate one of the department’s data-mining projects in late 2006, saying it appears to lack clear guidelines and oversight.In the fiscal 2007 land Security spending bill, lawmakers discussed possible problems over the department’s Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE) program.”A prototype is currently available to analysts in [the DHS] Intelligence and Analysis [unit] using departmental and other data, including some on U.S. citizens,” lawmakers wrote.”The ADVISE program plan, total costs and privacy impacts are unclear and therefore the conferees direct the inspector general to conduct a comprehensive program review and report within nine months of enactment of this act.”DHS has spent about $40 million on the project, lawmakers said.They cite worries that ADVISE might intrude on the privacy rights of U.S. citizens, especially by reading their personal e-mails and blogs.  House members asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) earlier last year to investigate the program.”We’ve been long concerned about how the department treats Americans‘ privacy and due process rights,” Martin Olav Sabo, (D-MN), said during a May 2006 markup of the land Security spending bill.”ADVISE appears to be a new variation on the highly controversial Defense Department Total Information Awareness program that was supposed to be terminated in 2003.”A DHS spokesman told CongressDaily that ADVISE is not yet an active program. When complete, he said, ADVISE will “deliver technology or a set of technologies to provide the capability to connect the dots” of intelligence, a need cited by the 9/11 Commission.”It extracts important relationships and correlations from a wealth of data and produces actionable intelligence,” he said. “What it does perform is data integration at a large scale.”But he would not describe the particular type of data collected through the program–and this is the problem.The concern is not with what DHS wishes to do, but what its ADVISE program will actually do that is the issue here. Is it a program that is in fact destroying our most basic liberties in the name of “protection”?And arguing the “False Dilemma” fallacy–that we must either destroy our rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” or others will do it for us–is no argument either. Throughout American history we’ve been able to discover and disrupt the covert actions of secret societies like the Ku Klux Klan, and the enemy covert activities of both the Nazis and the Soviets without once destroying our natural rights recognized by the Constitution. There is no valid reason for us to do it now.ADVISE is one of 12 data-mining programs either used or under development by the DHS, the inspector general admitted in an August 2006 report. That report provided a summary of what DHS hopes to achieve with each program, but did not go into detail about their activities, costs, or impacts on privacy.The report added that ADVISE can be tailored and deployed for specific purposes and areas of interest.”For example, it is being developed to incorporate chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive threat and effects data,” the report noted. “Still in development, ADVISE will connect information extracted from text and images, databases, and simulation and modeling tools to  provide a watch-and-warning system for analysts.”But again, noted lawmakers, there was no clear analysis what all this is doing to American liberty.Appropriators expressed their concern with the possible problems inherent in the use of data-mining technology, and directed the DHS privacy officer to submit a report on those efforts.The land Security spokesman acknowledged the privacy office is doing a privacy impact assessment for ADVISE, but he did not know when it would be completed.