Doubleclick Does it Better Anyway
By jimrob | September 6, 2007
DHS Ends Criticized Data-Mining Program
The Homeland Security Department scrapped an ambitious anti-terrorism data-mining tool after investigators found it was tested with information about real people without required privacy safeguards.
The department has spent $42 million since 2003 developing the software tool known as ADVISE, the Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement program, at the Lawrence Livermore and Pacific Northwest national laboratories. It was intended for wide use by DHS components, including immigration, customs, border protection, biological defense and its intelligence office.
Pilot tests of the program were quietly suspended in March after Congress’ Government Accountability Office warned that “the ADVISE tool could misidentify or erroneously associate an individual with undesirable activity such as fraud, crime or terrorism.”
Since then, Homeland Security’s inspector general and the DHS privacy office discovered that tests used live data about real people rather than made-up data for one to two years without meeting privacy requirements. The inspector general also said ADVISE was poorly planned, time-consuming for analysts to use and lacked adequate justifications.
It cost too much, didn’t work right, and had “undesirable” consequences. Sounds like the ideal government project.
DHS spokesman Russ Knocke told The Associated Press on Wednesday the project was being dropped.
“ADVISE is not expected to be restarted,” Knocke said. DHS’ Science and Technology directorate “determined that new commercial products now offer similar functionality while costing significantly less to maintain than ADVISE.”
Doubleclick and Yahoo track people so much better these days.
Topics: "Privacy", They Know What You Did Last Summer |
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