Just an addendum...

...to "What the Supreme Court should have known," a few posts down.

In the wake of the Total Information Awareness debacle, Donald Rumsfeld created a panel to consider and make recommendations about data mining by the federal government.

To strike a balance, the group, known as the Technology and Privacy Advisory Committee (TAPAC), called for technological changes that would "anonymize" data so investigators could hunt for suspicious activities and associations without immediately knowing whom they were probing,

reported MSNBC on June 28.

In short, they want to have it both ways: Approve of data mining, sifting through massive amounts of information to see what they can find, while claiming to protect privacy. But how much protection is actually being offered?

To query personally identifiable information, investigators would need authorization from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. That court has a rotating group of judges, chosen by the U.S. chief justice, who review applications for electronic surveillance.

That court is also widely known as a joke. It was created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978 to authorize covert surveillance in "foreign intelligence" cases. In the time since, it has, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center's compiliation of the Court's annual reports, entertained over 16,000 requests for surveillance under FISA, with over a third of those coming in the last five years. Over all that time, it has denied precisely three.

What's more,

TAPAC said its restrictions should apply only to general data mining on U.S. citizens. Analysis of government employees and airplane passenger lists, presumably including the developing CAPPS II airport security program, could continue unchanged. Foreign suspects and overseas intelligence data also would not be covered by the new restrictions.

So exactly what part of this actually constitutes "restrictions?"

And such data mining is far more widespread - and for more widespread purposes - than you might realize.

A report in May from the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found 199 examples of data mining programs in government agencies, including 54 that sift through information purchased from private-sector aggregators.

Most of the programs aren't aimed at terrorism. Several work to ensure federal employees aren't misusing government credit cards. The Internal Revenue Service plumbs databases to look for clues about potential tax cheats.

To be more specific, the actual report, released on May 4 and available in .pdf format here, said that it found that

out of all 199 datamining efforts identified, 122 used personal information. ...

Agencies also identified efforts to mine data from the private sector and from other federal agencies, both of which could include personal information. Of 54 efforts to mine data from the private sector (such as credit reports or credit card transactions), 36 involve personal information. Of 77 efforts to mine data from other federal agencies, 46 involve personal information (including student load application data, bank account numbers, credit card information, and taxpayer identification numbers).

Oh, yeah, just in case you're not sure, yes, your "taxpayer identification number" is your social security number.

What that means is the a number of federal agencies are using data mining not as a means to investigate but as fishing expeditions, not because they think there's something to be found but because they want to see if they can find anything. And in a good number of cases they use commercial databases as well as government ones.

"There's a growing realization that data mining is a fact of life in the government and that we need to begin to get a handle on it, develop some rules," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the technology and liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Well I for one say that is grossly inadequate. I'm tired of running behind increasing insults to privacy, to what William O. Douglas called "the right to be left alone," perpetrated by power-hungry prying eyes, by cash-hungry government agencies (You do know that one of the reasons that info about your driver's license and driving record may be in one of these databases is because your state Department of Motor Vehicles sold it to them, yes?), by greedy corporations, tired of running behind them going "uh, excuse me? Could you slow down a little, please?"

I don't want rules, I want bans. The government - in fact, government on all levels - should be absolutely banned from datamining any information beyond that lawfully held in its own internal records unless they can show a specific need, a specific basis for suspecting criminal activity. And then all government agencies should be banned from selling or otherwise transferring personal information it has gathered in the course of its lawful work - and it should have no other - to any private agency and should not be allowed to transfer such information to other government agencies except pursuant to a proper warrant. And finally, the use of social security numbers for any identifying or tracking purpose other than those directly related to tax and Social Security Administration should be outlawed.

"The government can just go buy personal data from the private sector - that's not a great privacy policy," said Evan Hendricks, publisher of the Privacy Times newsletter. "It's the wild wild West, and you have to be Jesse James if you're going to protect your own privacy."

In that case, we'd better strap on our political six-shooters and start getting ready to shoot the intrusions.