CRS warns about uselessness of FBI-employed food-purchase surveillance Nick Juliano

Published: Wednesday January 2, 2008



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Print This Email This In separate report, UK-based privacy watchdog says US 'endemic surveillance' is among world's worst Congressional researchers warned last month that attempts to identify potential terrorists based on food purchases could easily be based on inaccurate information and waste government time and resources. It's unclear if reports that the FBI had been doing precisely that led to the Congressional Research Service admonition. But a 41-page CRS report outlines several ways in which data mining falls short as a terror-preventing tactic. The data-mining mismanagement identified by CRS serves as one of myriad reasons a UK-based privacy watchdog has ranked the United States alongside China, Russia and Singapore among the top surveillance societies on the globe. In its report, CRS warned that the government was pushing forward with data-mining efforts ostensibly to prosecute the War on Terror, despite concerns about inaccurate and incomplete information that could "make data mining an ill-suited tool" for predicting terrorist activity. In the case of shopper's club cards, data that grocery stores use to target coupons and advertisements at customers might be useless when applied to national security investigations because of recordkeeping errors, inaccurate information or duplicate records, CRS warns. If a government agency were to use that information to target individuals based on food purchases associated with particular religious observances though, an outcome based on inaccurate information could be, at the least, a waste of resources by the government agency, and an unpleasant experience for the misidentified individual. However, according to Jeff Stein in Congressional Quarterly, the FBI "sifted through" grocery store data around San Francisco in 2005 and 2006. "The idea," Stein writes, "was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area." The FBI, for its part, issued a vague non-denial denial pronouncing the story "too ridiculous to be true." Effort wasted examining grocery store receipts was not the only problem identified by CRS in its survey of government data-mining efforts, including the "Total Information Awareness" program (which was later renamed the "Terrorism Information Awareness" program in an "Orwellian" twist to placate critics). Such routine access to privately collected data on Americans, not to mention the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program and Congress's attempts to scuttle oversight of possible abuses as it rewrites the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, has the US listed as an "endemic surveillance society" in Privacy International's latest survey. As Kim Zetter notes at Wired's Threat Level blog: In terms of statutory protections and privacy enforcement, the US is the worst ranking country in the democratic world. In terms of overall privacy protection the United States has performed very poorly, being out-ranked by both India and the Philippines and falling into the "black" category, denoting endemic surveillance. The full Congressional Research Service report, Data Mining and Homeland Security: An Overview, is available at this link. Privacy International's 2007 International Privacy Ranking are here.



