ADVISE and Consent
by digby
When the Democrats in congress wonder why we civil libertarians get so testy about allowing the Bush administration unfettered power to spy on its own citizens, this is why. When they aren’t gaming the system or plotting dirty tricks, they are screwing everything up so badly that innocent people inevitably get caught up in matters over which they have no control:
The Homeland Security Department scrapped an ambitious anti-terrorism data-mining tool after investigators found it was tested with information about real people without required privacy safeguards.
The department has spent $42 million since 2003 developing the software tool known as ADVISE, the Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement program, at the Lawrence Livermore and Pacific Northwest national laboratories. It was intended for wide use by DHS components, including immigration, customs, border protection, biological defense and its intelligence office.
Pilot tests of the program were quietly suspended in March after Congress’ Government Accountability Office warned that “the ADVISE tool could misidentify or erroneously associate an individual with undesirable activity such as fraud, crime or terrorism.”
Since then, Homeland Security’s inspector general and the DHS privacy office discovered that tests used live data about real people rather than made-up data for one to two years without meeting privacy requirements. The inspector general also said ADVISE was poorly planned, time-consuming for analysts to use and lacked adequate justifications.
DHS spokesman Russ Knocke told The Associated Press on Wednesday the project was being dropped.
[…]
The GAO said in March that DHS should notify the public about how an individual’s personal information would be verified, used and protected before ADVISE was implemented on live data.
I wonder if anyone’s going to ask why they used real people’s information instead of making them up as they were required to do? And what’s been done with the data?
Seriously, even if you were to grant that these people are filled with integrity and would never use such information for nefarious purposes, how can anyone trust them not to make the kinds of mistakes that can ruin innocent people’s lives? It’s true that much of the necessity for civil liberties springs from a very healthy mistrust of government authority, but that’s not the only reason. Nobody’s perfect and the stakes are much to high to allow any police agencies to operate in secret and without any kind of check on their power — they screw up.
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