Gao : Fed Data Mining Exensive
A May 27 General Accounting Office (GAO) report on federal data mining focusing on individuals found 199 active or planned projects across 52 agencies, and all but 77 of those projects involved Americans’ personal data. The lion’s share was coordinated by the Defense Department, and their goals ranged from the identification of criminals and terrorists to the analysis of scientific and research data.
The GAO report listed helping agencies to improve performance or services as the chief reason for carrying out data mining, while the lowest number of data mining projects were concerned with intelligence analysis and uncovering terrorist operations.
Fifty-four projects were listed in the report as using data provided by private firms such as credit card issuers, 36 of which involved names, Social Security numbers, and other kinds of personally identifiable information.
In tandem with the release of the GAO’s findings was a report from the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and the Heritage Foundation that offered a three-step approach for developing and employing data mining without endangering personal privacy.
The first recommendation called for a way to ensure the anonymity of individuals while commercial database producers and government agencies share information by using an intermediary.
The second recommendation was to embed authorization requirements into federal systems for viewing data to guarantee that data is seen only by those who need to see it, and the third recommendation called for the incorporation of audit logs into the computing system to recognize and monitor improper access to data as well as misuse of data.
“We can use technology to protect privacy as the government acquires more and more data and more data analytical capabilities,” declared CDT executive director James Dempsey.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from the Wired News (05/27/04); Zetter, Kim .
