Is data mining a civil rights violation?

The American Civil Liberties Union says Congress should limit government data-mining efforts because some techniques don't work and many raise serious privacy concerns. Timothy Sparapani, legislative counsel at the ACLU, said no credible study has found that data mining to help identify possible terrorists or criminals has worked. He testified before the House Homeland Security Committee that data mining to investigate known criminals or crimes can lead government investigators down the wrong path and result in the monitoring of  thousands of innocent people.

"If in fact we are all separated by only a few degrees of linkage, then as we move out from an individual who's under review...pretty soon all of us become suspects," Sparapani said. "We find ourselves in a position where everyone is under the guise of suspicion; everyone is being investigated by the government."

Sometimes, the government hasn't looked at the effectiveness of tech programs and whether they can avoid privacy problems, according to Nuala O'Connor Kelly, senior counsel for information governance and privacy at General Electric and former chief privacy officer at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Sparapani and Fred Cate, a law professor and director of the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University, both recommended that the House ban the use of some kinds of data mining at DHS.

For more on the controversy over data mining:
- check out this CIO.com article

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