Against Data-Mining Uses Team 10 Ben Jabara Jesse Lentz Ben Heller

Background  Uses data warehouses comprised of large amounts of data to find trends  Increased usage after terrorist attacks (Dept. of Homeland Security)  Data Mining Uses –improving service or performance –detecting fraud, waste, and abuse –analyzing scientific and research information –detecting criminal activities or patterns –analyzing intelligence and detecting terrorist activities

Sources of Data  Directly from individuals –Surveys  Web Crawlers –Indexing Services like search engines  Government Agencies –National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration  Private Sector Sources –Credit Card Companies –Banks and other Financial Institutions

GAO Study of Data Mining  Government agencies required to provide notice to individual respondents explaining why the information is being collected –Only 2 of 5 agencies in GAO study provided this notice –Agency compliance with key security requirements was inconsistent  122 of 199 data mining efforts used personal information –student loan application data –bank account numbers –credit card information –taxpayer identification numbers  Results: “Until agencies fully comply with these requirements, they lack assurance that individual privacy rights are being appropriately protected”

Inherent Data Mining Issues  Can reveal patterns and relationships but doesn’t tell the value or significance of these patterns  Can identify connections between behaviors and/or variables  DOES NOT necessarily identify a causal relationship –Leads to false positives and incorrect conclusions

Data Mining Ineffectiveness The New York Times confirmed that point, with its report that the NSA has sent the FBI a "flood" of tips generated by mass domestic eavesdropping and data mining, virtually all of which led to dead ends that wasted the FBI's resources. "We'd chase a number, find it's a schoolteacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism," one former FBI agent told the Times. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration.” ACLU.org - Eavesdropping 101: What Can The NSA Do?

Data Mining Ineffectiveness 1)Detect: Terrorists Enjoy Driving El Caminos 2)Classify: El Camino lovers classifies person as potential terrorist 3)ID: John Bagby internet queries reveals El Camino interests 4)Track: Bagby tracked searching for El Camino availability at 5)Understand: Bagby works for a university that does research for sensitive government projects 6)Preempt: Bagby’s door kicked down by government agents

Privacy Violations  Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness System –Violation of 4 th Amendment rights because warrants needed to search a particular place as opposed to blanket searches –Right of people to be secure…in their papers  Data mining and warehousing efforts hastily implemented after 9/11 –Few privacy considerations

Further Problems  Compromise of personal data by hackers or data misuse –Many data warehousing efforts performed by private businesses