Here's another quote from the ACLU.
ACLU Hails DHS-Funded Report Condemning Data Mining
The report validates ACLU fears that the practice of data mining is not only vastly invasive to Americans’ privacy but is also ineffective.
“Data mining as preventative law enforcement is alchemy at its worst,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative
Office. “Given the administration’s steady creep towards a total surveillance society, this report could not be more relevant. It is a scathing
rebuke of the Bush administration’s policy of vast and indiscriminate information gathering. A major pillar of the administration's post-9/11
policy has proven itself, as we said it would, to be wholly unstable. The systematic and broad-scale surveillance of Americans is doing nothing to
keep us safe. With data mining, it is clearer than ever that the risk far outweighs the reward.”
“This report validates the ACLU's longstanding claim that data mining for anti-terror and law enforcement work is worse than junk science, it is
pseudo-science,” said Timothy D. Sparapani, ACLU Senior Legislative Counsel. “Government agencies that are spending billions on data mining to
fight terror would spend their money more effectively trying to discover a magical formula to turn lead into gold. The bloated watch lists are a
special case in point. Applying data mining techniques like ‘link analysis’ to the million-person watch list casts a stain of suspicion on
everyone who encounters someone on that list – and will quickly balloon it to a hundred million-person watch list. If not stopped now, data mining
will turn us all into suspects.”
Maybe sometime in the not so distant future we just may see the government come to their senses and stop this unnecessary surveillance and data
gathering on its own citizens!
|
