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Study of Data Mining for Terrorists Is Urged
New York Times (10/08/08) P. A20; Lichtblau, Eric

All U.S. government programs that use data-mining technology to search
through databases to find clues on terrorist activities should be
evaluated to determine if they are effective or even legal, concludes a
new National Research Council (NRC) report.  The U.S. government has been
aggressively using data-mining tools since the Sept. 11 attacks, as
counter-terrorism officials in many intelligence agencies have sought to
analyze records on travel habits, calling patterns, email, financial
transactions, and other data to isolate possible terrorist activity.  The
National Security Agency's practice of wiretapping terror suspects without
warrants, screening suspicious airline passengers, and the Pentagon's
now-defunct Total Information Awareness program all have relied on data
mining.  The NRC report warns that successfully using these tools to deter
terrorism will be extremely difficult due to legal, technological, and
logistical problems.  The report says a haphazard approach to using
data-mining tools threatens both Americans' privacy rights and the
country's legitimate national security needs.  Data mining has been shown
to work in commercial settings to predict product trends and detect credit
fraud, but there is little evidence to confirm that data mining can be
used to find terrorists, the report says.  Part of the problem is that the
sample of known terrorists and actual attacks is so small that it is
difficult to establish a pattern of suspicious behavior that can be used
to find other terrorists.  The rush to accumulate enormous amounts of
information also increases the risk of a significant number of false leads
that could implicate innocent people.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/washington/08data.html



 Barry Wellman
 _______________________________________________________________________

  S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC              NetLab Director
  Department of Sociology                        University of Toronto
  725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388                  Toronto Canada M5S 2J4
  http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman            fax:+1-416-978-3963

  Updating history:     http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php

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