Of late, the Bush administration said it views the president's authorization of the National Security Agency's (NSA) eavesdropping on Americans and others inside the United States as necessary so that the agency could move quickly to monitor communications that may disclose threats to the U.S. Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the U.S. without the court-appointed warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying. The operation allowed the NSA to search for evidence of terrorist activity.

Indeed, defenders of the wiretapping program say it has been a critical tool in helping disrupt terrorist plots and prevent attacks inside the U.S. Many security experts, however, argue the wiretapping to have been an overstepping of the government's boundaries.

This is simply one case, albeit a now-notorious example, of the government questionably hindering personal privacy rights via technology for the sake of national security. So where exists the line at which national security becomes an unwarranted invasion of privacy? Is there such a thing as warranted privacy invasion?

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS):

Homeland Security harnesses our nation's scientific and technological resources to provide Federal, state, and local officials with the technology and capabilities to protect the homeland. One area of focus for the Department is catastrophic terrorism — threats to the security of our homeland that could result in large-scale loss of life and major economic impact. Research is designed to counter threats to the homeland, both by evolutionary improvements to current capabilities and development of revolutionary, new capabilities.

Amid the furor over the NSA's electronic eavesdropping, Congress may be poised to expand its scrutiny of government efforts to "mine" public data for hints of terrorist activity.

ADVISE
Data-mining — the systematic, often automated gleaning of insights from databases — is seen "increasingly as a useful tool" to help detect terrorist threats, the General Accountability Office (GAO) reported in 2004. Of the nearly 200 federal data-mining efforts the GAO counted, at least 14 were acknowledged to focus on counterterrorism.

Now the U.S. government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity, the Christian Science Monitor reported earlier this month.

The little-known data-collection system, called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic (ADVISE), is a research and development program within the DHS, part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment" (TVTA) portfolio. The massive data sweep is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government's latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. Little is known about the effort; only a few public documents mention it.

The Department of Homeland Security is actively developing the system — parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development — despite Congress having little knowledge of it. A major part of ADVISE involves data-mining — or "dataveillance," as some call it, said the Christian Science Monitor article. It means sifting through data to look for patterns.

According to a DHS report, the technology will draw connections between persons, determining who is related to whom, who works with whom, who lives close to whom, and who is associated with which organizations, according to OMB Watch. "It will also flag suspicious behavior patterns and form the foundational structure for other more specifically targeted programs, like the Biodefense Knowledge Center, whose goal it is to 'integrate disparate components in order to anticipate, prepare for, prevent, detect, respond to, and attribute biological threats,'" said OMB Watch.

What sets ADVISE apart from, say, a supermarket's use of the system is its scope. (If a supermarket finds that customers who buy cider also tend to buy fresh-baked bread, it might group the two together with data-mining.) It could collect a vast array of corporate and public online information and cross-reference it against U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system then would store it as "entities" — linked data about people, places, things, organizations and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 DHS conference.

"The storage requirements alone are huge — enough to retain information about 1 quadrillion entities," the Christian Science Monitor summarized of the DHS report's estimation.

The key is not merely to identify terrorists, or sift for keywords, but to identify critical patterns in data that illuminate their motives and intentions, Joseph Kielman, manager of the TVTA portfolio, wrote in a presentation at a conference in November. As envisioned, ADVISE and its analytical tools would be used by other agencies to look for terrorists.

But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens' privacy.

A number of computer scientists do support the concepts behind ADVISE. Other including congressional supporters, are less sure and want more information about the data-mining effort(s).

In addition a criticism concerning the program's effectiveness — many believe it would be a waste of taxpayer dollars to develop such enormously expensive technologies that offer little in return — one problem with data-mining technology is the risk of false-positive results associated with so much data collection. DHS reports that some of technologies used in the ADVISE program have only a 60 percent to 80 percent accuracy rate. Many data sources, particularly Internet sources, contain inaccurate information (again adding to concerns over the technology's potential effectiveness).

Privacy advocates point to the potential for abuse as an ever-present concern with all data-mining programs. Fearing a reemergence of the monitoring of innocent Americans that occurred in the1950s and '60s, civil liberties advocates are calling on Congress to put in place strict procedures for the use of information such as that to be collected under the ADVISE program, along with clear procedures for judicial and congressional oversight.

The DHS acknowledges that the program needs to contain safeguards for personal privacy and civil liberties, and it plans to institute protective procedures, such as creating "multiple levels of trusts," which only allow certain people who have access to ADVISE to access personal information, and "reversible anonymization," which "allows human beings to look at information about a person and only learn the identity of the person if the information fits a profile of suspicious behavior," OMB Watch said.

Privacy advocates, however, find the DHS-discussed privacy safeguards to be insufficient. The most important safeguard to protecting privacy and civil liberties, they argue, is oversight, something "sorely lacking from the program in which the Defense Department would have had complete, unchecked authority to access and monitor Americans' private information," according to OMB Watch. "Without oversight and accountability, critics say, even well-intentioned counterterrorism programs could experience mission creep, having their purview expanded to include non-terrorists — or even political opponents or groups."

While privacy laws do place some restriction on government use of private data (e.g., medical records), they do not prevent intelligence agencies from buying information from commercial data collectors. According to privacy experts, Congress has done little so far to regulate the practice or even require basic notification from agencies.

In a separate 2004 report to Congress, the GAO cited eight issues that need to be addressed to provide adequate privacy barriers amid federal data-mining, noted the Christian Science Monitor. Top among them was establishing oversight boards for such programs.

References

U.S. Department of Homeland Security: Research & Technology

US plans massive data sweep
by Mark Clayton
The Christian Science Monitor, Feb. 9, 2006

Dep't of Homeland Security Plans Broad Info Grab
OMB Watch, Feb. 22, 2006

Additional Resources

Bush 'backed spying on Americans'
BBC News, Dec. 16, 2005

Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts
by James Risen, Eric Lichtblau, contributed research by Barclay Walsh
The New York Times (Select), Dec. 16, 2005

Administration Paper Defends Spy Program
by Carol D. Leonnig
The Washington Post, Jan. 20, 2006

Thank You for Wiretapping
The Wall Street Journal, OpinionJournal.com, Dec. 20, 2005

Privacy group: U.S. laws needed to rein in surveillance
by Grant Gross
Computerworld, Feb. 22, 2006