IE 11 Not Supported

For optimal browsing, we recommend Chrome, Firefox or Safari browsers.

Sen. Leahy Prods DOJ on Data Mining Policies

The Senate Judiciary Committee is looking for information on the Total Information Awareness system being developed by DARPA.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Three Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are asking U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to detail the what data-mining technologies the Department of Justice is deploying and how the data mining is being used.

"We raise this inquiry against the backdrop of public concern over the Total Information Awareness System (TIA) being developed under the supervision of Admiral Poindexter within the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA)," said a letter from Sen. Patrick Leahy, D.-Vt., the current chairman of the Judiciary Committee, to Ashcroft.

"TIA is intended, according to Department of Defense officials, to generate tools for monitoring the daily personal transactions by Americans and others, including tracking the use of passports, driver's licenses, credit cards, airline tickets and rental cars," the letter said.

Leahy's letter asks the DOJ to furnish information on:

- Any private sector or proprietary databases obtained or being used by the DOJ for data-mining or pattern-recognition activities and any databases from government agencies outside the DOJ being used for such purposes.

- Whether any private sector or proprietary databases in use by the DOJ have been aggregated with any data from government agency databases for data-mining or pattern-recognition activities.

- If the DOJ is using proprietary data provided by private intermediaries, what procedures are in place to preserve the confidentiality policies of these intermediaries? Is the DOJ compensating the private intermediaries for assisting in the data mining? Has the DOJ taken any steps to shield the private intermediaries from liability for their cooperation with the government?

- The procedures, if any, the DOJ is using to ensure the accuracy and reliability of information currently collected and stored in databases used for data mining?

The letter also asks the DOJ about specific data-mining programs that DARPA is developing as part of TIA, and, specifically, whether the programs are being used for data mining or pattern recognition. The programs are Genoa I and II; EELD (Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery); Genisys; and TIDES (Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization.

Lastly, the letter speculates on the relationship between the DOJ and the newly created Department of Homeland Security with respect to data mining, especially whether the DOJ's data-mining operations will be transferred to the new Department of Homeland Security and whether it's advisable to have a coordinated data mining effort with one agency clearly held accountable for setting guidelines of data uniformity and reliability?