Personal privacy at issue
Posted by Jacque on October 8th, 2008
Data mining doesn’t work
The most extensive government report to date on whether terrorists can be identified through data mining has yielded an important conclusion: It doesn’t really work, notes Cnet News.
A National Research Council report concludes that automated identification of terrorists through data mining (such as phone, medical, and travel records or Web sites visited) or any other mechanism “is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts.” There are inevitably false positives that result in “ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses” being incorrectly flagged as suspects.
The authors conclude the type of data mining that government bureaucrats would like to do can’t work. “If it were possible to automatically find the digital tracks of terrorists and automatically monitor only the communications of terrorists, public policy choices in this domain would be much simpler. But it is not possible to do so.”
Image from joanofarctan. Creative Commons license.
New bill against DHS laptop seizure practices
A new bill written by US Senators Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., has privacy-protecting safeguards.
The Travelers Privacy Protection Act would allow border agents to search electronic devices only if they had reasonable suspicions of wrongdoing. In addition, the legislation would limit the length of time that a device could be out of its owner’s possession to 24 hours, after which the search becomes a seizure, requiring probable cause.
View Sen. Feingold’s press release on the bill. [via Slashdot]