Homeland Security data mining may have violated privacy law
“Soccer teams, family reunions and Civil War re-enactors” are in danger of being misidentified as terrorists from a data-mining program the Department of Homeland Security is testing which may have already violated privacy laws.
The Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE) program uses pattern analysis techniques to sift through a vast array of Americans’ private information, such as flight and hotel reservations, looking for suspicious activity, without having any prior suspicions or knowledge of wrongdoing.
ADVISE was originally sold as a program to help intelligence analysts look for weapons of mass destruction, but officials have said that it could be used for a wide variety of tasks.
But the program is already facing a Congressional investigation. According to a Government Accountability Office report not yet released, the program may have already violated privacy laws by using real data instead of fake data during its testing.
The violations involved the government’s use of citizens’ private information without proper notification to the public and using the data for a purpose different than originally envisioned, said the source, who declined to be identified because the report is not yet public.
The issue lies at the heart of the debate over whether pattern-based data mining — or searching for bad guys without a known suspect — can succeed without invading people’s privacy and violating their civil liberties.
DHS spokesman Larry Orluskie said officials had not yet read the GAO report and could not comment. . . .
Officials at the office of the director of national intelligence stressed that pattern analysis research remains largely theoretical. They said the more effective approach is link analysis, or looking for bad guys based on associations with known suspects. They said that they seek to guard Americans’ privacy, focusing on synthetic and foreigners’ data. Information on Americans must be relevant to the mission, they said.
Still, privacy advocates raise concerns about programs based on sheer statistical analysis because of the potential that people can be wrongly accused. “They will turn up hundreds of soccer teams, family reunions and civil war re-enactors whose patterns of behavior happen to be the same as the terrorist network,” said Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute. — Washington Post
An apologist defended pattern analysis by saying that a military data mining program using pattern analysis correctly identified terrorists among detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and did not identify detainees who were not terrorists. (And ignored the fact that there were “not terrorists” there in the first place.)
When the ADVISE program came to light a year ago, I said that you could be flagged as a potential threat if anything you ever did was out of the ordinary. The danger here is that there is no such thing as “normal.” We are all out of the ordinary — unique — in some way. When that attribute gets plugged into a Homeland Security data mining program, suddenly you will become a suspected terrorist, entirely without reason. That’s the way it works.
In fact, it’s far more likely that you will be a victim of botched law enforcement activity than of a terrorist attack.
Homeland Security has several other data mining programs in the pipeline, as well. Do you feel safer now? You shouldn’t. You should be very frightened.
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