Security and Civil Liberties Experts Question Data Mining

Two security and civil liberties experts say it’s time for Congress to limit the government’s data-mining efforts because not only does it raise privacy concerns, but some of the techniques don’t even work.

In an article on the ComputerWorld website, Grant Gross says Timothy Sparapani, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), was one of the experts speaking at a government privacy roundtable for the Homeland Security for the House of Representatives. He told the roundtable that no credible study has found that subject-based data mining, or using government-held data to investigate known criminals or crimes that have been committed, can lead government investigators astray.

“If in fact we are all separated by only a few degrees of linkage, then as we move out from an individual who's under review ... pretty soon all of us become suspects,” Sparapani said. “We find ourselves in a position where everyone is under the guise of suspicion; everyone is being investigated by the government.”

But it’s not just that it infringes on privacy. It’s also “awfully bad for national security, because you devote such an enormous amount of resources looking at leads that can’t possibly lead back to someone who can actually be arrested or prosecuted,” Sparapani added.

Sparapani wasn’t the only one speaking out, Gross says. Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, asked if the government was looking at whether data mining and other technology-based investigative approaches actually work before deploying them.

To read the full article, click here: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&
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