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washingtonpost.com

New Services Are Minding Your Business
By Leslie Walker

  Thursday, March 4, 2004; Page E01

  Admiral John Poindexter must be irked. The furor over his "Total
Information Awareness" surveillance plan helped trigger his departure
from the Pentagon's research agency last year. Now entrepreneurs are
selling new data-mining tools that do similar things on a smaller scale
-- and venture capitalists are hurling money at them.

  The new tools are business cousins of Friendster and the other
social-networking sites that took the Net by storm last year, helping
people set up electronic networks of friends. But like Poindexter's
ill-fated scheme -- a massive plan that would have allowed the creation
of electronic dossiers on millions of Americans to sniff out potential
terrorists -- the business-networking tools raise prickly privacy
issues.

Read the rest...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28512-2004Mar3

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