KEEPING THE SONS OF “TIA” IN CHECK

On this, every­one in the gold-​​tinged, eagle-​​frescoed Senate con­fer­ence room agreed: Federal author­i­ties badly want to be able to comb the data trails of ordi­nary peo­ple in order to spot ter­ror­ists. But what — if any — lim­its should be put on that fright­en­ingly inva­sive power? A panel of law­mak­ers, think tankers, data min­ers and civil lib­er­tar­i­ans assem­bled here Tuesday couldn’t even begin to make up their minds.
Congress has yanked the fund­ing for Terrorism Information Awareness, the Pentagon’s noto­ri­ous berdata­base effort. But research into TIA-​​like projects con­tin­ues, essen­tially unre­stricted. Tomes of reg­u­la­tions tell spooks and cops and g-​​men how they can amass intel­li­gence and gather evi­dence. But much of the data mined by these chil­dren of TIA — like itin­er­aries, school tran­scripts and credit card receipts — might not fall under those tra­di­tional def­i­n­i­tions. There’s only a vague sense that these database-​​combing pro­grams can’t be allowed to grow out of con­trol.
“When some­body buys a ticket on Delta Airlines in Munich, Germany, if there’s any poten­tial for (that per­son to have) a sus­pi­cious back­ground, I want bells and whis­tles to go off on that com­puter,” Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-​​Ga.) told the group of 25 or so pol­icy mak­ers assem­bled in the Russell Senate Office Building’s third floor by the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank. But Congress “won’t allow (intel­li­gence) agen­cies” to “truly gather infor­ma­tion on people’s per­sonal lives.“
Nice words. But as Jim Dempsey, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Center for Democracy & Technology, notes, “none of us really have the answer” for how to put them into action.
My Wired News report from Washington has more.
THERE’S MORE: As usual, Phil Carter has got some inter­est­ing things to say about this. Check ‘em out here.

October 23rd, 2003 | Data Diving | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.