Data Mining Software to Go, Please
Interesting article in the NY Times on a shopping trip taken by the NSA to Silicon Valley recently:
On the wish list, according to several venture capitalists who met with the officials, were an array of technologies that underlie the fierce debate over the Bush administration’s anti-terrorist eavesdropping program: computerized systems that reveal connections between seemingly innocuous and unrelated pieces of information.
The tools they were looking for are new, but their application would fall under the well-established practice of data mining: using mathematical and statistical techniques to scan for hidden relationships in streams of digital data or large databases.
From the TIA program to Able Danger to the NSA controversy, data-mining is involved in some of the biggest privacy controversies of our time. Ultimately, a Supreme Court showdown on the concept of data-mining as it relates to the assumed ‘right to privacy’ would seem inevitable, would it not? The outcome would be far more important and wide-reaching than Roe…
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