According to reports, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is developing a program to collect and search a wide array of personal, public and classified information, similar to a program killed by Congress in 2002. The Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE) program would implement a massive data mining program to prevent terrorist attacks; the program, however, continues to lack the necessary oversight structure and procedures to protect privacy and safeguard civil liberties.

The Christian Science Monitor recently reported that DHS is actively developing the ADVISE program, despite Congress having little knowledge of it. DHS is allocating $50 million in funding this year to develop the data mining tool that will store massive amounts of information, including buying habits, travel records, criminal records, intelligence reports, and information gleaned from public news sources such as blogs and traditional sources like CNN. According to a DHS report, the technology will draw connections between persons, determining who is related to whom, who works with whom, who lives close to whom, and who is associated with what organization/s. It will also flag suspicious behavior patterns and form the foundational structure for other more specifically targeted programs, like the Biodefense Knowledge Center, whose goal it is to "integrate disparate components in order to anticipate, prepare for, prevent, detect, respond to, and attribute biological threats."

This is not the first time the federal government has sought to establish a comprehensive data mining program. The Total Information Awareness (TIA) program, developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2002, bares a close resemblance to DHS's ADVISE program. The program was quickly shut down by Congress amid wide-spread privacy concerns, despite DARPA's attempt to assuage such concerns by renaming the program Terrorism Information Awareness. TIA would have been able to store and retrieve personal information, including data pertaining to people's health records, travel plans, buying habits, educational records, with few restrictions to protect privacy and ensure citizen's Fourth Amendment rights related to searches and seizures. The plan was viewed by many as a Big Brother-like attempt to store all existing data and monitor the public for suspicious behavior.

The U.S. intelligence agencies have developed over the last 50 years in the context of the Cold War, when the United States faced a finite number of threats from an identifiable number of sources and locations. The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 forced a dramatic shift in intelligence collection methodology and priorities. No longer does the country face a finite number of threats, and no longer are the locations and sources of threats clearly identifiable. Hence, greater emphasis is now placed on increasing the amount of potentially pertinent information collected and on drawing connections between disparate, seemingly innocuous bits of data.

As the Government Accountability Office reported in 2004, there is a plethora of intelligence-collection programs, both wide in scope and outside the bounds of traditional intelligence programs. Most recently, we learned of the National Security Agency's (NSA) warrantless domestic spying program authorized by President Bush that monitors international telephone and Internet communications of American citizens with individuals in certain Middle Eastern countries, operating without judicial oversight.

DHS acknowledges that the program needs to contain safeguards for personal privacy and civil liberties and plans to institute protective procedures like creating "multiple levels of trust," which only allow certain people who have access to ADVISE to access personal information and "reversible anonymization," which "allows human beings to look at information about a person and only learn the identity of the person if the information fits a profile of suspicious behavior."

Privacy advocates, however, find the privacy safeguards discussed by DHS to be insufficient. The most important safeguard to protecting privacy and civil liberties, they argue, is oversight, something sorely lacking from the program in which the Defense Department would have had complete, unchecked authority to access and monitor Americans' private information. In its 2004 report, GAO recommended an oversight board as the best way to ensure the protection of privacy. Moreover, Congress should be updated on DHS's activities and efforts to protect against terrorist attacks while maintaining civil liberties. As the Christian Science Monitor reported, many members of Congress with direct oversight of DHS were not even aware of the program's existence, let alone the civil liberties and privacy issues it raises.

A separate criticism concerns the program's effectiveness. Many believe it would be a waste of taxpayer dollars to develop such enormously expensive technologies that offer little in return. Past examples of such inefficiency include an NSA program called Trailblazer that cost $1 billion dollars to develop but was a complete failure. Trailblazer was intended to be a revolutionary data mining program that would have easily searched and highlighted suspicious patterns among the enormous collection of NSA intelligence, but, as reported by MSNBC, it is, according to Robert D. Steele of the CIA, a "complete and abject failure." An additional problem with data mining technology is the risk of false-positive results associated with so much data collection. Such false leads could drain agency resources with unnecessary follow up and violate the privacy rights of falsely identified individuals. DHS reports that some of technologies used in the ADVISE program have just a 60 to 80 percent accuracy rate. Many data sources, particularly Internet sources, contain inaccurate information, adding to concerns over the technology's potential effectiveness.

Finally, privacy advocates pointed out that the potential for abuse is an ever-present concern with all data mining programs. Fearing a reemergence of the monitoring of innocent Americans that occurred in the1950s and 60s, civil liberties advocates are calling on Congress to put in place strict procedures for the use of information such as that to be collected under the ADVISE program, along with clear procedures for judicial and congressional oversight.