Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Proposed law on federal data mining

Bipartisan Legislation Requires Federal Agencies to Report to Congress on the Use and Development of Data-Mining Programs

Washington, D.C. -- U.S. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) was joined by Senator John Sununu (R-NH) and others in introducing a bill requiring federal agencies to report to Congress on data-mining programs they are developing or using. The Federal Agency Data-Mining Reporting Act mandates that agencies disclose to Congress information about data-mining programs they are using in connection with anti-terrorism and law enforcement efforts, including why they are using the data-mining technology, if the programs work as intended, and what steps are being taken to protect privacy and due process rights.


I once heard an interesting presentation by James Kasprzak where he said that one of the ways people defeat data mining is to simply lie, and that excessive personal data collection is therefore self-defeating.

Solzhenitsyn on data and privacy

Edit -

A reader was kind enough to send a this link, which I accidentally rejected as comment spam. It is worth looking at -
filtering the useful signal from noise
The post looks like it just addresses data mining from blogs, Kasprzak was talking about excessive data collection from sources such as credit agencies, purchasing histories, and other things. He was also talking about what happens in police states, people simply lie, until the lies pile so much that the information well is simply poisoned.

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