Data on Americans mined for terror risk

[journalist3072]

Source: AP via Yahoo News

By LARA JAKES JORDAN, Associated Press Writer
56 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - The FBI is gathering and sorting information about Americans to help search for potential terrorists, insurance cheats and crooked pharmacists, according to a government report obtained Tuesday.

Records about identity thefts, real estate transactions, motor vehicle accidents and complaints about Internet drug companies are being searched for common threads to aid law enforcement officials, the Justice Department said in a report to Congress on the agency's data-mining practices.

In addition, the report disclosed government plans to build a new database to assess the risk posed by people identified as potential or suspected terrorists.

The chairman of the Senate committee that oversees the Justice Department said the database was "ripe for abuse." The American Civil Liberties Union immediately derided the quality of the information that could be used to score someone as a terror threat.

-snip-

The system, still under construction, is designed to help counterterror investigators save time by narrowing the field of people who pose the greatest potential threat and will not label anyone a terrorist, Boyd said.

But it could be based, in part at least, on commercial or public information that might not be accurate — potentially ranking an innocent person as a terror threat. Watch lists, for example, have mistakenly identified people as suspects based on their similar names or birthdates to terrorists.







Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070711/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/fbi_data_mining;_ylt=AvlfOZitSCvsJvNsuqEbDC_MWM0F

[Purveyor]

1. If you are doing nothing wrong or illegal...what is your concern. Now please 'show us your papers'!

:sarcasm:

[Purveyor]

2. From the report:

The five other databases detailed in the report include:

—An identity theft intelligence program, used since 2003, to examine and analyze consumer complaints to identify major identity theft rings in a given geographic area.

—A health care fraud system that looks at billing records in government and private insurance claims databases to identify fraud or over-billing by health care providers. It also has been running since 2003.

—A database created in 2005 that looks at consumer complaints to the Food and Drug Administration to identify larger trends about fraud by Internet pharmacies.

—A housing fraud program that analyzes public data on real estate transactions to identify fraudulent housing purchases, including so-called property flipping. The database was built in 1999.

—A system that compares National Insurance Crime Bureau information against other data to crack down on fake car accident insurance claims and identify major offenders.

The 38-page report was four months late in being sent to Congress for required oversight. Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy said it "raises more questions than it answers."

"Unfortunately, the Congress and the American public know very little about these and other data mining programs, making them ripe for abuse," said Leahy, D-Vt.

[rodeodance]

3. looks like if there exists a huge database----it will be mined for the sake of mining.

[alllyingwhores]

6. Ripe for abuse?

Isn't this illegal in and of itself?

[EFerrari]

4. Translation: FBI spying illegally on American citizens. n/t

[journalist3072]

5. Me thinks we have a winner here! eom

[tom_paine]

7. Bingo. We ALL have a dossier now, like the East German Stasi

It's so comforting to know Big Bushler knows when I am sleeping, he knows when I awake, he knows when I've been good or bad...

And you can bet all the fucking tea grown with poisonous sewage in China that this is the tiniest tip of the smallest iceberg.

This, I believe, is TRULY the first time America has been ruled by people who have total contempt for America and Americans, for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

It will be interesting to see if and how much we can recover from this. It still may be mostly downhill from here.

[cui bono]

8. Crooked pharmacists. Are those the ones that give out Plan B

and birth control pills?

[aquart]

9. How many American citizens are suspected of plotting terrorist acts?

It's a fair question, isn't it?

[OneBlueSky]

10. Gestapo, American style . . . n/t

.