MSNBC Database firm gave feds terror suspects

"Before helping to launch the criminal information project known as Matrix, a database contractor gave U.S. and Florida authorities the names of 120,000 people who showed a statistical likelihood of being terrorists -- sparking some investigations and arrests."

"The scoring incorporated such factors as age, gender, ethnicity, credit history, "investigational data," information about pilot and driver licenses, and connections to "dirty" addresses known to have been used by other suspects."

redux [03.31.03]
MSNBC Profiling by grocery receipts?

"The U.S. government has discovered a powerful resource in its war against terrorism -- credit-card records, hotel bills, grocery lists and other records detailing the private lives of its citizens. Government investigators are turning to commercial databases to track down and isolate possible hijackers and suicide bombers before they strike, raising fear among privacy advocates that long-standing protections against government snooping may be eroded."

" Officials and many security experts say such "data mining" techniques are necessary to flush out a foe that does not wear a uniform but blends in with ordinary civilians to infiltrate and undermine American society."

redux [12.02.02]
Wired News Total Info System Totally Touchy

"Can a massive database of information on Americans really preempt terrorist attacks?"

""The proposal is do-able and feasible, but the idea of making it into a single window onto disparate information and integrating it on a massive scale is the real challenge," said Chris Sherman, associate editor of Search Engine Watch."

"Others in the industry question the system's feasibility."

redux [04.12.02]
The New York Times Magazine Silicon Valley's Spy Game
[requires 'free' registration]

"''I feel like Alice has fallen through the looking glass,'' Ellison said. His voice rose; he was starting to get a little testy. ''Does this other database bother you here? We can't touch that database because I won't be able to use my credit card. Like, I won't be able to go to the mall!'' He took on the voice of Sean Penn's stoner from ''Fast Times at Ridgemont High.'' ''Like, that's really disturbing. Like, don't mess with my mall experience. O.K., so people have to die over here without this, but that's not going to affect my experience going to the mall.'' He exhaled, and in his regular billionaire voice asked, ''I mean, what the hell is going on?''"

redux [10.12.01]
Fortune Above the Crowd: From Wired to Wiretapped

"In the weeks following the World Trade Center tragedy, many government officials were actively lobbying for increased Internet surveillance as a method of restricting terrorist activity."

"But putting aside any debate on civil liberties, a stronger case against the government's Internet surveillance attempts is that there may well be huge problems in both implementation and effectiveness. One predicament is just how much of the genie is already out of the bottle."

redux [09.27.01]
MSNBC Is FBI asking for data overload?

"The Bush administration is pressing Congress to approve the most sweeping expansion of federal law-enforcement authority since the Cold War. But would U.S. officials even know what to do with the deluge of information their new power could make available?"

"Yet even if the president gets his way, it could give rise to one of the classic problems of the information age: The capacity to produce oceans of data often isn?t matched by sufficient tools to sort and interpret it."

Database Nation Chapter 9: Kooks and Terrorists

"The question we face, then, is a simple one: is it possible to prevent future incidents of terrorism by systematically monitoring all potential terrorists and imprisoning them before they can strike? And, if so, are such measures worth the cost?"

"So here is the root of the conflict: new technologies are creating tremendous new opportunities for violent groups to inflict death and destruction on society as a whole. At the same time, new technologies are also giving law enforcement agencies the ability to conduct universal surveillance of the citizenry in ways that have never before been imaginable. Should law enforcement organizations engage in widespread, pervasive surveillance to deal with the rising risk of megaterrorists?"

redux [02.15.01]
The Atlantic Online The Reinvention of Privacy

"The debate over these questions illustrates one irreducible truth: privacy is not so much a legal or technical concept as a social one. "The dominant feature of the current privacy debate," Fred Cate told me when I asked him to try to sum things up, "is its irrationality. The drivers are emotional." I think he's right. The crucial question about privacy today is the same it has always been - namely, whom should you trust?

A lot of people instinctively don't trust technology, especially in the hands of businesses, to protect privacy. But, as Robert Ellis Smith and others have pointed out, contemporary notions of privacy have in many cases evolved not despite new technology but because of it. "Privacy," the influential journalist and editor E. L. Godkin famously wrote, in Scribner's magazine in 1890, "is a distinctly modern product, one of the luxuries of civilization." Phil Agre made a related point to me, a bit more bluntly. "The idea that technology and privacy are intrinsically opposed," he said, "is false.""