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Appendix I: Illustrative Government Data Mining Programs and Activity
Pages 218-238

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From page 218...
... , "Data Mining Report: DHS Privacy Office Response to House Report 108-774," DHS, Washington, D.C., July 6, 2006; DHS Office of Inspector General, "Survey of DHS Data Mining Activities," OIG-06-56, DHS, Washington, D.C., August 2006.
From page 219...
... In creating the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) , Congress directed that it implement a program to match airline passengers against a terrorist watch list.
From page 220...
... Although the possibility of using commercial databases to check for threats is still included, the use of commercial data is now precluded.5 Other differences between CAPPS II and Secure Flight include limiting screening to checking for terrorism threats, not criminal offenses (although this was initially included) , and using only historical data during testing phases.
From page 221...
... The 2006 DHS Privacy Office report on data mining did not include an assessment of Secure Flight; it stated that searches or matches are done with a known name or subject and thus did not meet the definition of data mining used in the report.8 In a prepared statement before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in January 2007, the TSA administrator noted progress in addressing those concerns and the intention to make the program operational by some time in 2008.9 Most recently, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff announced that Secure Flight would no longer include data mining and would restrict information collected about passengers to full name and, optionally, date of birth and sex. Chertoff stated that Secure Flight will not collect commercial data, assign risk scores, or attempt to predict behavior, as was 6 U.S.
From page 222...
... is a Florida-based nonprofit research and training organization specializing in law enforcement, juvenile justice, criminal justice, and homeland security. See http://www.iir.com/default.htm.
From page 223...
... Concerns were raised that the data would be combined with private data, such as credit history, airline reservations, and telephone logs; but the MATRIX Web site stated those would not be included. The system initially included a scoring system called High Terrorist Factor (HTF)
From page 224...
... Office of the Inspector General, "Report of Investiga tion: Alleged Misconduct by Senior DOD Officials Concerning the Able Danger Program and Lieutenant Colonel Anthony A Shaffer, U.S.
From page 225...
... 27U.S. Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General, "Report of Investigation: Alleged Misconduct by Senior DOD Officials Concerning the Able Danger Program and Lieutenant Colonel Anthony A
From page 226...
... An assessment of ADVISE was not included in the 2006 DHS Privacy Office report on data mining, because it was considered a tool or technology and not a specific implementation of data mining. 33 That position was noted in a GAO report on the program that questioned the decision not to include a privacy assessment of the program, given that "the tool's intended uses include applications involving personal information, and the E-Government Act, as well as related Office of Management and Budget and DHS guidance, emphasize the need to assess privacy risks early in systems development."34 The GAO report identified the program's intended benefit as helping to "detect activities that threaten the United States by facilitating the analysis of large amounts of data that otherwise would be very difficult to review," noting that the tools developed as part of ADVISE are intended to accommodate both structured and unstructured data.35 The report concluded that ADVISE raised a number of privacy concerns and that although DHS had added security controls related to ADVISE, it had failed to assess privacy risks, including erroneous associations of people, misidentification of people, and repurposing of data collected for other 32 Representative Curt Weldon in testimony to the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, September 21, 2005, available at http://judiciary.senate.gov/testimony.
From page 227...
... . A later DHS Privacy Office report did review the ADVISE program and drew a careful distinction between ADVISE as a technology framework and ADVISE deployments.38 The report first reviewed the technology framework in light of privacy compliance requirements of the DHS Privacy Office described in the report.39 In light of those requirements, it then assessed six planned deployments of ADVISE:40 • Interagency Center for Applied Homeland Security Technology (ICAHST)
From page 228...
... . TVIS used a series of data sets to identify opportunities to test the capability of the ADVISE technology framework to help analysts in the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis.
From page 229...
... Details about the program remain secret, but as part of the program the president authorized NSA to eavesdrop on communications of people in the United States without obtaining a warrant when there is "reasonable basis to conclude that one party to the communication is a member of Al Qaeda."48 Existence of the program first surfaced in a New York Times article published in December 2005.49 Questions as to the legality of the program led a federal judge to declare the program unconstitutional and illegal and to order that it be suspended. That ruling was overturned on appeal on narrow grounds regarding the standing of the litigants rather than the legality of the program.50 In a letter to the Senate Committee on the 45 Remarks of Stewart Baker, Assistant Secretary for Policy, Department of Homeland Security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C., December 19, 2006.
From page 230...
... Some press reports suggest that such technology is used extensively to collect and analyze data from sources that include telephone and Internet communication, going well beyond keyword searches to use link analysis to uncover hidden relationships among data points.51 The adequacy of the FISC to address technology advances, such as data mining and traffic-analysis techniques, has also been called into question.52 As this report is being written (June 2008) , changes in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act are being contemplated by Congress.
From page 231...
... , "Data Mining Report: DHS Privacy Office Response to House Report 108-774," July 6, 2006, pp.
From page 232...
... , "Data Mining Report: DHS Privacy Office Response to House Report 108-774," DHS, Washington, D.C., July 6, 2006, pp.
From page 233...
... Using commercial off-the-shelf systems, this program uses tools for searching, link analysis, entity resolution, geospatial analysis, and temporal analysis to provide intelligence analysts with an ability to view, query, and analyze information from multiple data sources.67 The program is focused on aiding in discovery and tracking of terrorism threats to people and infrastructure. With three other DHS programs -- Numerical Integrated Processing System (NIPS)
From page 234...
... In 2004, FinCEN began a program called BSA Direct intended to provide law-enforcement agencies with access to BSA data and to data mining capabilities similar to those available to FinCEN.73 BSA Direct was permanently halted in July 2006 after cost overruns and technical implementation and deployment difficulties.74 70 U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
From page 235...
... This program extracts data from the Federal Trade Commission's Identity Theft Clearinghouse and compares them with FBI data from case complaints of identity theft and with suspicious financial transactions filed with FinCEN. Further comparisons are made with data from private data aggregators, such as LexisNexis, Accurint, and Autotrack.
From page 236...
... Data sources include formatted reports of potential fraudulent claims for insurance reimbursement as identified and prepared by the insurance industry's National Insurance Crime Bureau, FBI case-reporting data, commercial data aggregators, and health-care insurance claims information from the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and the chiropractic industry.
From page 237...
... initiatives: SearchPoint. DEA project that uses prescription data from insurance and cash transactions obtained commercially from ChoicePoint, included the prescribing official (practitioner)
From page 238...
... Before publication of the report, many of the programs were either unknown publicly or had unclear scopes and purposes. Commenting on the DOJ report shortly after its delivery to the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Senator Patrick Leahy commented that "this report raises more questions than it answers and demonstrates just how dramatically the Bush administration has expanded the use of this technology, often in secret, to collect and sift through Americans' most sensitive personal information," and said that the report provided "an important and all too rare ray of sunshine on the Department's data mining activities and provides Congress with an opportunity to conduct meaningful oversight of this powerful technological tool."84 83 Ibid., p.


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