A survey of US federal agencies has found more than 120 programs that collect and analyze large amounts of personal data on individuals to predict their behavior.
The survey, which was to be issued yesterday by the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, found that the practice, known as data mining, was ubiquitous.
In canvassing federal agencies, the accounting office found that 52 were systematically sifting through computer databases. These agencies reported 199 data mining projects, of which 68 were planned and 131 were in operation. At least 122 of the 199 projects used identifying information like names, e-mail addresses, Social Security numbers and driver's license numbers.
The survey provides the first authoritative estimate of the extent of data mining by the government. It excludes most classified projects, so the actual numbers are likely to be much higher.
The Defense Department made greatest use of the technique, with 47 data mining projects to track everything from the academic performance of Navy midshipmen to the whereabouts of ship parts and suspected terrorists.
Privacy
Democratic Senator Daniel Akaka, who requested the report by the accounting office, said: "I am disturbed by the high number of data mining activities in the federal government involving personal information. The government collects and uses Americans' personal information and shares it with other agencies to an astonishing degree, raising serious privacy concerns."
A federal advisory committee appointed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said last week that Congress should pass laws to protect the civil liberties of Americans when the government scans computer records and data files for information about terrorists.
Newton Minow, chairman of the committee, said he and other panel members would present their report to Rumsfeld yesterday.
Hidden patterns
The panel said federal agencies should generally be required to obtain court approval "before engaging in data mining with personally identifiable information" on US citizens. It also said that federal investigators should, if possible, work with anonymous data, stripped of personal identifiers, and use the minimum amount of data needed to achieve their purpose.
The panel was created to quell an uproar over a Pentagon plan to hunt terrorists by monitoring e-mail messages and fishing through huge databases of financial, medical and travel information.
The accounting office defined data mining as the use of sophisticated technology, statistical analysis and modeling to uncover hidden patterns and subtle relationships in data, and to infer rules that allow for the prediction of future activity.
Of the 199 data mining projects, 54 use information from the private sector, like credit reports and records of credit card transactions. Seventy-seven projects use data obtained from other federal agencies, like student loan records, bank account numbers and taxpayer identification numbers.
In its catalog of data mining, the accounting office listed these projects.
The Internal Revenue Service mines financial data to predict which individual tax returns have the greatest potential for fraud and which corporations are most likely to make improper use of tax shelters.
No limits
The Defense Intelligence Agency mines data from the intelligence community and searches the Internet to identify people, including US citizens, who are most likely to have connections to foreign terrorist activities.
The Department of Homeland Security seeks clues to possible terrorist activity by looking for patterns in myriad records of crimes, arrests and unusual behavior, traffic tickets and incidents involving the possession of firearms.
James Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group, said: "In many cases, the private sector is subject to stricter standards than the government. The Fair Credit Reporting Act, for example, imposes limits on commercial uses of personal financial and other data, but there are virtually no limits on government uses."
Dempsey said the Constitution provided little protection to an individual with personal information stored in a commercial database to which the government gained access. The Supreme Court has held that a person has no legitimate "expectation of privacy" in information held by a bank or other third party, because the materials are business records, not private papers.
MONEY GRAB: People were rushing to collect bills scattered on the ground after the plane transporting money crashed, which an official said hindered rescue efforts A cargo plane carrying money on Friday crashed near Bolivia’s capital, damaging about a dozen vehicles on highway, scattering bills on the ground and leaving at least 15 people dead and others injured, an official said. Bolivian Minister of Defense Marcelo Salinas said the Hercules C-130 plane was transporting newly printed Bolivian currency when it “landed and veered off the runway” at an airport in El Alto, a city adjacent to La Paz, before ending up in a nearby field. Firefighters managed to put out the flames that engulfed the aircraft. Fire chief Pavel Tovar said at least 15 people died, but
LIKE FATHER, LIKE DAUGHTER: By showing Ju-ae’s ability to handle a weapon, the photos ‘suggest she is indeed receiving training as a successor,’ an academic said North Korea on Saturday released a rare image of leader Kim Jong-un’s teenage daughter firing a rifle at a shooting range, adding to speculation that she is being groomed as his successor. Kim’s daughter, Ju-ae, has long been seen as the next in line to rule the secretive, nuclear-armed state, and took part in a string of recent high-profile outings, including last week’s military parade marking the closing stages of North Korea’s key party congress. Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) released a photo of Ju-ae shooting a rifle at an outdoor shooting range, peering through a rifle scope
South Korea would soon no longer be one of the few countries where Google Maps does not work properly, after its security-conscious government reversed a two-decade stance to approve the export of high-precision map data to overseas servers. The approval was made “on the condition that strict security requirements are met,” the South Korean Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said. Those conditions include blurring military and other sensitive security-related facilities, as well as restricting longitude and latitude coordinates for South Korean territory on products such as Google Maps and Google Earth, it said. The decision is expected to hurt Naver and Kakao
Gaza is rapidly running out of its limited fuel supply and stocks of food staples might become tight, officials said, after Israel blocked the entry of fuel and goods into the war-shattered territory, citing fighting with Iran. The Israeli military closed all Gaza border crossings on Saturday after announcing airstrikes on Iran carried out jointly with the US. Israeli authorities late on Monday night said that they would reopen the Kerem Shalom crossing from Israel to Gaza yesterday, for “gradual entry of humanitarian aid” into the strip, without saying how much. Israeli authorities previously said the crossings could not be operated safely during
RSS