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If Markle and the federal government get their way, decisions on which federal employees have access to which sets of federal data will be based on how the information is going to be used, rather than on the ethnic origin of the subject or where the data came from. It's a policy that, if implemented, could open up all kinds of electronic records on ordinary Americans for federal viewing.
Herb Edelstein, the president of Two Crows Consulting and an expert in data-mining, is skeptical of the government's efforts. Edelstein helps private sector companies mine data for customer information and background checks. He says that data-mining can be a powerful tool if the government knows who it is targeting and wants to know everything about them or to quickly learn who they associate with. It's less effective if the government is simply doing random searches for patterns.
Pattern searching works well for businesses because they can afford to be wrong a lot of the time, Edelstein says. A business that wants to market its products to small home-based businesses might mine phone records to see who has a home phone and a fax number at the same address, on the theory that they might be running a home-based business. They may be wrong in half the cases, Edelstein says, but if they are right in the other half, their marketing dollars may be well spent.
But randomly searching for patterns among millions of pieces of data is likely to yield thousands of hits, most of which could be fruitless in a terrorism investigation.
"The best a program can do is say we have to investigate this person," said Edelstein. "It takes a huge amount of time to investigate someone. They can't clear people fast enough now. It might take months of effort."
At the moment, Edelstein says, the government is still in the phase of exploring data-mining to see what it can do, and there has been a definite swing away from protecting personal privacy.
"After 9/11, the government said if private industry is doing this, we should too, and maybe we can figure out who the bad guys are," said Edelstein.
Meanwhile, the federal government is plowing ahead with the parts of the federal information sharing system it can build now in anticipation of the day when the whole system is up and running.
At 3320 Garner Road in Raleigh, federal, state and local officials are preparing to open the state's information and analysis sharing center next month. Every state in the nation is required to have one by 2007. Called "fusion centers," they are part of something called the National Criminal Intelligence Sharing Plan, and they'll eventually grow into intelligence and information hubs that swap data between local law enforcement, the private sector and the federal government.
Special Agent In Charge Pam Tully, a veteran of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, says that the center's databases will all run on the same global standards others across the nation use. It could be years before all the centers are able to link up, she says.
"We are all trying to build our centers on that same platform so on that day when we all connect, it will be smooth," said Tully.
Online correction
In this story, we incorrectly printed that MIB Inc. was a subsidiary of ChoicePoint. In order to correct the error without disturbing the flow of the article, a few paragraphs were moved around but their content wasnt changed aside from removing the error.