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The government begins sifting databases to find clues to terrorism in the making
By Dana Hawkins - 4/7/03 - USNews.com
Annoyed at having to remove your shoes at airport security? Just wait. This month, the Transportation Security Administration began testing a screening program on some Delta Air Lines flights that would subject passengers to a whole new level of scrutiny. Here's the plan: Book a seat, and a computer data-sifting process matches your name, address, birth date, and ticket-purchasing information against financial and commercial databases and government watch lists. The goal is to verify your identity and look for any hint of a security risk. "Our system today is not as precise as it ought to be," says TSA spokesman Robert Johnson. "We don't want to waste more time focusing on grandmas."

The Department of Defense's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, a five- year effort, has committed $260 million so far to develop tools for large-scale data mining. But it ran into a public-relations fiasco after Vice Adm. John Poindexter of Iran-contra fame was named to lead the project. Its Orwellian name and a logo (since dropped) showing an all-seeing eye atop a pyramid didn't help. Congress recently voted to require the Pentagon to justify the program and seek approval before monitoring citizens. Yet politics and privacy fears have not halted the quest: TIA research is going strong, and smaller operations like TSA's are getting underway.

*****I bet you thought this was a dead issue...That's what dotted lines on org charts are for*****

A short related article: usnews.com

posted by A Curmudgeon 5:24 AM