House hearing: Clash over use of data mining

March 25, 2003, 04:35 PM —  IDG News Service — 

A coalition of privacy groups called on the U.S. Congress to halt the creation of a federal database of airline-passenger profiles until more details are available, such as who would be included and how it would be operated. Meanwhile, the White House's chief information officer (CIO) questioned Tuesday at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing whether that data-mining program would be effective.

At that hearing, a law professor and congressman disagreed over whether Congress should regulate government data-mining efforts, while most witnesses praised the use of data analysis for everything from reducing credit card abuse in government to catching terrorists.

Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University and legal affairs editor of The New Republic magazine, said Tuesday that "suspicionless surveillance of large groups of people" would violate the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures.

Rosen said the U.S. Department of Defense's Total Information Awareness (TIA) research project, which focuses on surveillance through mass data mining, and the Transportation Security Administration's proposed second version of the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II) are examples of such "mass dataveillance." (More information about CAPPS II, can be found at http://www.tsa.gov/public/display?theme=44&content=535.)

"It's possible to design data-mining technologies in ways that strike better rather than worse balances between liberty and security," Rosen told the Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations, and the Census. That subcommittee falls under the House Committee on Government Reform.

"I urge Congress to accept the task of learning about the design choices inherent in these technologies. You have it in your power to strike a thoughtful balance between liberty and security, and all you need now is the will," he said.

Congress has decided to put a hold on the hotly debated TIA project, but Rep. Tom Davis, a Republican from Virginia who chairs the full government reform committee, questioned whether regulating data mining would slow the benefits of such technology.

Calling information retrieval the "oil of the 21st century," Davis said the benefits of data analysis are many. "My theory is we need to be slow about coming in and over-regulating sometimes," he said. "You let the industry come up with its own protocols before the government comes in and starts imposing a regulatory and taxing regime that could really stifle the growth and potential of this."

Rosen asked Davis to consider whether data sharing that's appropriate in private industry would be appropriate in national security agencies. "Much of the history of our privacy laws for the past 50 years have been based on the idea that completely unregulated information sharing is not consistent with the values of the Constitution or American citizens," Rosen said. "We don't want every low-level information officer in the field to know ... that I'm late on my child-support payments or that I'm late on my credit card. Complete transparency of information, total unregulated use, which many Silicon Valley people are urging, wouldn't be consistent with the values of the Fourth Amendment."

Rosen questioned whether huge government data-mining

I like it!
Post a comment
The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Free books

Essential JavaFX
Get started building rich Web apps quickly with an introduction to the power of JavaFX key features -- scene node graphs, nodes as components, the coordinate system, layout options, colors and gradients, custom classes with inheritance, animation, binding, and event handlers.Enter now!

The Nomadic Developer
Consulting can be hugely rewarding, but it's easy to fail if you are unprepared. To succeed, you need a mentor who knows the lay of the land. Aaron Erickson is your mentor, and this is your guidebook. Enter now!

Featured Sponsor

AISO founders envisioned a Web hosting company that was environmentally friendly. While the company employed energy-efficient innovations like solar panels, its infrastructure produced unacceptable power and cooling requirements. Find out how AISO leveraged AMD technology to overcome their challenge in this case study white paper.

In this whitepaper, Scalar explores the opportunity to change the landscape with respect to mission critical databases built around Oracle. Leveraging technologies such as Linux, high-end commodity processing power and Oracle RAC technology to architect, design, build and maintain database infrastructure that delivers maximum availability, reliability and performance at a fraction of traditional cost.

On a typical day, weather.com, the Web site for The Weather Channel in Atlanta, serves up between 15 million and 20 million page views. But in September 2004, when back-to-back hurricanes ransacked Florida, the peak traffic on one day more than tripled: over 70 million page views by more than 7 million unique visitors. Read the full success story now.

Marketplace