Government Increasingly Turning to Data Mining

GOVERNMENT INCREASINGLY TURNING TO DATA MINING
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Arshad Mohammed and Sara Kehaulani Goo]
Industry executives, analysts and watchdog groups say the federal government has significantly increased what it spends to buy personal data from the private sector, along with the software to make sense of it, since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They expect the sums to keep rising far into the future. Privacy advocates say the practice exposes ordinary people to ever more scrutiny by authorities while skirting legal protections designed to limit the government's collection and use of personal data. Critics acknowledge that such data can be vital to law enforcement or intelligence investigations of specific targets but question the usefulness of "data-mining" software that combs huge amounts of information in the hopes of finding links and patterns that might pick someone out as suspicious.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/14/AR200606...
(requires registration)