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News -02-08-06 Feingold: Data Mining by Federal Government Needs Privacy Protections (Christian Science Monitor) "Amid the furor over electronic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, Congress may be poised to expand its scrutiny of government efforts to 'mine' public data for hints of terrorist activity." " 'One element of the NSA's domestic spying program that has gotten too little attention is the government's reportedly widespread use of data-mining technology to analyze the communications of ordinary Americans,' said Sen. Russell Feingold (D) of Wisconsin in a Jan. 23 statement." 02-06 -Editorial: A Question of Competence in Intelligence (MSNBC News) "As our esteemed senators fret over whether the NSA has violated their outdated 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, they are not paying enough attention to the competence issue. And no one seems to recall that the same Senate intelligence committee report from 2002 also criticized the 'NSA's cautious approach to any collection of intelligence relating to activities in the United States,' and its 'failure to address modern communications technology aggressively.' In recent years the agency tried to do so, but failed. To little notice, a giant $1 billion-plus program called Trailblazer that was to have brought the NSA up to date in data mining and pattern analysis—transforming the NSA's blizzard of signals intelligence into an easily searchable database—has turned into such a boondoggle that, one intelligence official says, "nothing can be salvaged out of it." " 'It’s a complete and abject failure,' says Robert D. Steele, a CIA veteran who is familiar with the program." 02-06 Papers Data Mining - Talon and Eagle Eyes Programs (SourceWatch.org) " 'To track domestic terrorist threats against the military, the Pentagon is creating a new database that will contain 'raw, non-validated' reports of 'anomalous activities' within the United States,' Brian McWilliams reported...June 25, 2003, in Wired News." "Talon reports grew out of a program called Eagle Eyes, an anti-terrorist program established by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations that 'enlists the eyes and ears of Air Force members and citizens in the war on terror,' according to the program's Web site. A Pentagon spokesman recently described Eagle Eyes as a 'neighborhood watch' program for military bases." TALON stands for "Threat and Local Observation Notice." 03-06 Data Mining for Patterns (New York Times) "The tools they were looking for are new, but their application would fall under the well-established practice of data mining: using mathematical and statistical techniques to scan for hidden relationships in streams of digital data or large databases." "But by fundamentally changing the nature of surveillance, high-tech data mining raises privacy concerns that are only beginning to be debated widely. That is because to find illicit activities it is necessary to turn loose software sentinels to examine all digital behavior whether it is innocent or not." 02-06

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