TalkLeft is reporting that Senator Feingold has sent a note to President Bush requesting information on the mining aspect of the “let’s spy on Americans without judicial oversight” doctrine. The excerpt of the note quoted by TalkLeft:
“One element of the NSA’s domestic spying program that has gotten too little attention is the government’s reportedly widespread use of data mining technology to analyze the communications of ordinary Americans. Today I am calling on the Director of National Intelligence, the Defense Secretary and the Director of the NSA to explain whether and how the government is using data mining technology, and what authority it claims for doing so.
Data mining is a new, unproven and intrusive technology in the counterterrorism context, and we need to know how it is being used, how effective it is in finding patterns of terrorist activity, and whether there are sufficient safeguards to protect the privacy of Americans. We can and must fight terrorism aggressively without infringing on the privacy of law-abiding Americans.”
I’ll repeat a mantra I’ve said a few times before: data mining isn’t inherently evil. It seems to me that a better use of energy and political effort would be at nailing down what data the government is allowed to collect, what it can/can’t be used for, what retention policies should be followed, and (most important) what safeguards will be put in place to ensure that unauthorized individuals cannot access such data and that the individuals being measured can request corrections when the inevitable errors arise.