On US Homeland Security, Data Mining and Civil Liberties

The US Defense Department’s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has recently launched a Total Information Awareness (TIA) Initiative as part of national efforts to safeguard the US homeland from future terrorist threats. The vision behind the Initiative is to integrate public and private databases of all data relevant to monitoring the activities of potential terrorists and their supporters, and querying, analyzing, and mining the data. The databases are to include such information as records of deposits and withdrawals from banks, money transfers through banks, enrollment in schools, records of entry into and departure from the US, records of travels via airlines and car rentals, purchase records for goods and services using credit cards, etc. Further, US President Bush has authorized the creation of Terrorist Threat Integration Center, in part to allow integrated access to various databases of the US federal government, including the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA, the FBI, the INS (Naturalization and Immigration Services), etc. in order to identify terrorist suspects and supporters, and to track their activities in a more timely and coherent manner. What the US government is actually attempting to do is to create a central database out of hitherto disparate databases, and query, analyze, and mine the central database to determine terrorist activities in a much more timely, coherent, and accurate manner than has been possible up to now.