New York Times (10/08/08) P. A20; Lichtblau, Eric

All U.S. government programs that use data-mining technology to search through databases to find clues on terrorist activities should be evaluated to determine if they are effective or even legal, concludes a new National Research Council (NRC) report. The U.S. government has been aggressively using data-mining tools since the Sept. 11 attacks, as counter-terrorism officials in many intelligence agencies have sought to analyze records on travel habits, calling patterns, email, financial transactions, and other data to isolate possible terrorist activity. The National Security Agency’s practice of wiretapping terror suspects without warrants, screening suspicious airline passengers, and the Pentagon’s now-defunct Total Information Awareness program all have relied on data mining. The NRC report warns that successfully using these tools to deter terrorism will be extremely difficult due to legal, technological, and logistical problems. The report says a haphazard approach to using data-mining tools threatens both Americans’ privacy rights and the country’s legitimate national security needs. Data mining has been shown to work in commercial settings to predict product trends and detect credit fraud, but there is little evidence to confirm that data mining can be used to find terrorists, the report says. Part of the problem is that the sample of known terrorists and actual attacks is so small that it is difficult to establish a pattern of suspicious behavior that can be used to find other terrorists. The rush to accumulate enormous amounts of information also increases the risk of a significant number of false leads that could implicate innocent people.