[ Also on InfoWorld:
Now, thanks to an investigative report that appeared in the Wall Street Journal [5], we know a bit more about some of the data going into that facility. One of the ways in which the Obama administration has not differed in virtually any respect from its predecessor is its insatiable appetite for data on you and me. You could even argue the Obamanistas have expanded upon the excesses of the Bushies, building out a national security infrastructure that is unprecedented in its ability to hoover up information on law-abiding American citizens.So when the administration decided to update some 2008 restrictions on what types of domestic data the spooks can shovel onto their plates, it also decided to loosen its belt and ask for a second helping. Per the WSJ’s Julia Angwin:
The rules now allow the little-known National Counter Terrorism Center to examine the government files of U.S. citizens for possible criminal behavior, even if there is no reason to suspect them. That is a departure from past practice, which barred the agency from storing information about ordinary Americans unless a person was a terror suspect or related to an investigation. Now, NCTC can copy entire government databases -- flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others. The agency has new authority to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, and to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. Previously, both were prohibited. Data about Americans “reasonably believed to constitute terrorism information” may be permanently retained.You like to hit the casino at the local reservation and host exchange students from Islamic-leaning countries? You, my friend, are on a watch list. After Watergate, Nixon’s enemies list, and news about the CIA’s many abuses of power came to light in the early 1970s, Congress passed one of its exceedingly rare pieces of privacy legislation. The Federal Privacy Act of 1974 was specifically designed to keep Uncle Sam from maintaining a Big Brother-like database on American citizens. But as Angwin notes, the law carved out a few loopholes -- like the requirement to simply post a notice about the data you plan to collect in the Federal Register -- which the NCTC is taking advantage of. Everything it’s doing is perfectly legal. After the DHS failed to keep the “underwear bomber” from boarding a plane at Detroit Airport three years ago, the White House decided to revise the rules to allow the NCTC to retain data on innocent Americans almost indefinitely and to mine that data for patterns. The new rules also allow the NCTC to share the its databases with any other agency, including foreign governments. (In May of this year, some two months after the new guidelines were approved by the U.S. Department of Justice, we learned that Fruit of the Boom wearer Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was secretly working with the CIA [6], which is likely why the BVD bomb failed to detonate. Was this all concocted to make the White House give the spooks the latitude they were seeking all along? Insert your favorite conspiracy theories here.) For their part, the spooks make the usual claims about “rigorous oversight” so that the data won’t be abused. But who’s watching the watchers? These days, each DHS agency has its own privacy officers -- a welcome change from previous administrations. But these officers still report to the agency heads, who are the ones pushing for this kind of big data analysis in the first place. Per the Journal:
At the Department of Justice, Chief Privacy Officer Nancy Libin raised concerns about whether the guidelines could unfairly target innocent people, these people said. Some research suggests that, statistically speaking, there are too few terror attacks for predictive patterns to emerge. The risk, then, is that innocent behavior gets misunderstood -- say, a man buying chemicals (for a child’s science fair) and a timer (for the sprinkler) sets off false alarms.Which is exactly the problem with these kind of rules: False positives could have disastrous consequences for innocent Americans. But other privacy officers were hesitant to criticize the new rules, for fear of setting off a “firestorm” within their agencies. Two privacy officers who raised objections to the new guidelines both left their government jobs shortly thereafter. And now we’re all being watched. Conduct yourselves accordingly. Top of Page Is Uncle Sam turning into Big Brother? Share your thoughts below or send me a clandestine email: cringe@infoworld.com [7].
This article, "Uncle Sam is drunk on data, pooh-poohing privacy [8]," was originally published at InfoWorld.com [9]. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog [10], and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter [11].