Government stopping terrorism, but at what cost?

On the subject of datamining and information-gathering to fight against terrorism, Senior Legislative Counsel for the ACLU Timothy Sparapani said the House Homeland Security Committee needs “to conduct real oversight.” He said that while “no one objects to the purpose,” many have a problem with the “results that are occurring.”

At a discussion today in the Canon Office Building in Washington DC, Sparapani called the process of datamining for predicting potential terrorists “a categorical and unmitigated waste of taxpayer dollars.” He said that predictive datamining programs are not sufficiently useful because they “will lead to a flood of false alarms.” Sparapani added that any program the government uses to fight terrorism must be able to makes U.S. citizens safer in order to justify any “intrusion of privacy.”

Former Chief Privacy Officer for the Department of Homeland Security Nuala O’Connor Kelly, remarked that while the government’s job to “anticipate and prevent” terrorism is difficult, she said that not enough people in the government were determining whether datamining programs worked. She also chastised the government for ineffectively using “the information it already has.”

Fred Cate (Distinguished Professor and Ben Dutton Professor of Law) called the fourth amendment a “paper tiger” against intrusions of privacy for the purposes of stopping terrorism. Cate said that the government should have a “stated purpose” for any datamining, and that the government should ask itself if it can get personal information for people with nothing in their past that would indicate possible terrorism. “There are no rules within the government,” stated Cate. Cate added that the “national security exception has become the norm” in regards to potential privacy intrusions.