Blue Girl has asked me to follow the doings of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees in the 110th congress.
The Senate Committee got off to a fast start yesterday with a background hearing on "Balancing Privacy and Security: The Privacy Implications of Government Data Mining Programs. "
The second witness, Jim Harper of the Cato Institute gave a very good summary of the issues involved in data mining in the fight on terror. It seems data mining is the worst of all possible worlds. It wastes a lot of resources creating false positives and every false positive is a potential source of problems for the poor American falsely targetted. According to Harper:
(D)ata mining is not, and cannot be, a useful tool in the anti-terror arsenal. The incidence of terrorism and terrorism planning is too low for there to be statistically sound modeling of terrorist activity.
Interesting. If that is the case, why do we mine data? This is a topic we will revisit during the coming congress.
The house judiciary committee doesn't have a hearing scheduled until next week. On 11/15/2006 - Representative Conyer and his collegues will consider "Legislation Cracking Down on Caller ID Spoofing." Not the same as data mining, but important to people who have been spoofed.
Now if I can just figure out how all this HTML stuff works.
