(Via Slashdot) The
Washington Post on Thursday ran an interesting story on the expansion of data-mining by
the federal government:
The Pentagon pays a private company to compile data on
teenagers that it can recruit to the military. The Homeland Security
Department buys consumer information to help screen people at borders and
detect immigration fraud.[...]Industry executives, analysts and watchdog groups say the federal
government has significantly increased what it spends to buy personal data
from the private sector, along with the software to make sense of it, since
the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They expect the sums to keep rising far into
the future.Privacy advocates say the practice exposes ordinary people to ever more
scruitny by authorities while skirting legal protections designed to limit
the government’s collection and use of personal data.