Data-Mining: Because I Love a Bloated Abbreviation

Commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security, the Committee on Technical and Privacy Dimensions of Information for Terrorism Prevention and Other National Goals (CTPDITPONG) recently released their report on the efficacy of data-mining techniques currently being used by the U.S. government. For those unfamiliar with the concept, the ACLU blog that I am referencing pointedly describes the crux of it:

"Let’s focus on the fact that our national security policy is largely based on the same kind of techniques and logic that marketing firms use to figure out what kind of cereal you might buy. Sleep tight tonight, guys."

By gathering every single piece of available data on every single person in the United States, the goal is, by inferring patterns in the dataset, to be able to predict the future actions of individuals...which is only slight less creepy (and a lot more flawed) than the 'technology' in Minority Report, whose premise the NSA probably admires but doesn't quite grasp. I rank these technologies right up there with the brain scan used to convict an Indian woman of murder (excellent article by the way) and these "airport bio scanners"-- that is to say that you would get more accurate data employing John Edward.

The Committee, apparently, felt the same way: "The committee made several recommendations in the report including greater external oversight of information gathering programs, a framework for both classified and unclassified programs and an emphasis on the quality, not quantity, of data. The report also discourages using behavioral patterns as a predictive measure, and considers any program attempting to assess an individual’s state of mind as suspect."

In my opinion, mind reading technologies haven't progressed any in the last 3,000 years and 'drag-net' style programs in general will always result in the needless entanglement of innocents while allowing all but the most inept 'criminal and terrorist masterminds' to evade capture. Still, our government seems determined to utilize them.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has an excellent write-up on what little we know of the data-mining based, NSA Spying program, AT&T's role, and the resultant scandal. Warning: the deeper you dig, the scarier it gets.