The government's interest in using technology to detect terrorism and other threats has led to increased use of data mining, according to a recent report obtained by the National Association of Chiefs of Police

A technique for extracting useful information from large volumes of data, data mining offers potential benefits but also raises privacy concerns when the data collected include personal information.

Even several conservative members of the US House of Representatives have some qualms about using data mining techniques within the US. Their concerns include the very real potential for abuse by a future presidential administration that may use data mining for reasons other than counterterrorism

The Government Accountability Office was asked by the US Congress to review the development by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) of a data mining tool known as ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement).

ADVISE is a data mining tool under development intended to help DHS analyze large amounts of information. It is designed to allow an analyst to search for patterns in data--such as relationships among people, organizations, and events -- and to produce visual representations of these patterns, referred to as semantic graphs, according to the GAO report.

None of the three planned DHS implementations of ADVISE that GAO reviewed are fully operational. (GAO did not review uses of the tool by the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis.)

The intended benefit of the ADVISE tool is to help detect threatening activities by facilitating the analysis of large amounts of data. DHS is currently in the process of testing the tool's effectiveness. Use of the ADVISE tool raises a number of privacy concerns. DHS has added security controls to the tool; however, it has not assessed privacy risks.

Privacy risks that could apply to ADVISE include the potential for erroneous association of individuals with crime or terrorism and the misidentification of individuals with similar names. Congressmen on both sides of the aisle have received complaints from Americans about misidentification by federal law enforcement using terror watch lists containing errors.

Several Republican congressmen said they believe a privacy impact assessment would identify specific privacy risks and help government officials determine what controls are needed to mitigate those risks. At the same time, liberal Democrats in Congress are calling for an end to all data mining regardless of its usefulness in the Global War on Terrorism.

ADVISE has not undergone such an assessment because DHS officials believe it is not needed given that the tool itself does not contain personal data. However, the tool's intended uses include applications involving personal data, and the E-Government Act and related guidance emphasize the need to assess privacy risks early in the system's development.

If an assessment were conducted and privacy risks identified, a number of controls could be built into the tool to mitigate those risks. For example, controls could be implemented to ensure that personal information is used only for a specified purpose or compatible purposes, and they could provide the capability to distinguish among individuals that have similar names to address the risk of misidentification.

Because privacy has not been assessed and mitigating controls have not been implemented, DHS faces the risk that ADVISE-based system implementations containing personal information may require costly and potentially duplicative retrofitting at a later date to add the needed controls.

After reviewing the GAO's report on data mining, several conservative congressmen voiced their concerns regarding the balancing of citizen privacy and national security considerations.

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