THE GUV-MENT DID IT AGAIN

As further substantiation for my post on the jeopardy of the Real ID Card, and data in the hands of government agencies, above, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) appears to have already violated privacy laws in testing a new program they plan to use in spying on the American public. Similar to the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program killed in 2003 over concerns for civil liberties, this new echo of TIA called ADVISE for Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement, apparently made the mistake of using real data in the test rather than the fake data they were supposed to use. Read more. The real debate I have raised in several past posts is whether random data mining can be done without invading individual privacy? Based on my former experience conducting this kind of predictive modeling, there is no way to avoid exposing innocents Americans in the process. The reason is that it is mandatory to know the good guy in order to be able to identify the bad guy. It’s a common-sense thing that government agencies probably don’t understand, and wouldn’t want you to know if they did.