Government Increasingly Turning to Data Mining, By Arshad Mohammed and Sara Kehaulani Goo, Washington Post, June 15, 2006; D03.
As federal agencies delve into the vast commercial market for consumer information, such as buying habits and financial records, they are tapping into data that would be difficult for the government to accumulate but that has become a booming business for private companies….
Privacy advocates say the practice exposes ordinary people to ever more scrutiny by authorities while skirting legal protections designed to limit the government’s collection and use of personal data.
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Bad enough that the gov’t engages in data mining, but as the VA’s recent loss of millions of soldier SSN’s shows that the government isn’t very good about securing the data it collects.
That’s not even considering that data mining will probably waste resources on many false positives.
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“And besides all that, what we need is a decentralized, distributed system of depositing electronic files to local libraries willing to host them.” — Daniel Cornwall, tipping his hat to Cato the Elder for the original quote.