Surveys report that the average American is worried about personal information privacy. For good reason, too – newly declassified files detail massive FBI efforts at data-mining.
Carl Caldwell, the president of Right-to-Know, released the following statement: “FBI files can begin with records as simple as bankruptcy, Veteran Administration activities, income tax difficulties, and passport and visa problems. More than 200 classifications like these are given to the files the FBI considers confidential, secret or top secret. An individual’s attempts to retrieve this information are often thwarted by the complexity of the system itself.” Caldwell continues, “As the government gains access to more and more aspects of a private citizen’s life in the name of preventing terrorism, more ordinary people will unknowingly become targets of investigation, and more files will be gathered on the innocent.”
FBI databases contain tens of thousands of records from car-rental companies, hotels, and national department stores. The system can correlate data from different sources to automatically identify terrorists, and was able to locate a suspected Al Qaeda operative hiding in Houston. It also discovered that members of a Pakistani terrorist group were working in Philadelphia as taxi drivers. And, when the United States government lost track of terror suspects during the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, the system was able to track down and find them spread across the southern United States.
Opponents, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a non-profit with the stated goal to protect online privacy), believe data-mining is the first step toward an Orwellian control over the population. EFF cites a National Research Council paper that concluded “data mining is a dangerous and ineffective way to identify potential terrorists, which will inevitably generate false positives that subject innocent citizens to invasive scrutiny by their government.”
The FBI hopes to add more sources of information to their database, including airline manifests from the Department of Homeland Security, the Postal Service’s change of address database, the national Social Security number database, and 24 other unidentified databases redacted in the released report.
Whether or not sacrificing personal information privacy is worth catching suspected terrorists is up to the individual to decide. There are immediate steps one can take to protect online privacy and prevent government efforts to scour social networking sites for personal details.
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