Guess I'll just get right to it. Dash down a sentence or two of nonsense first. Here comes the meat and potatos--from the Christian Science Monitor:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0209/p01s02-uspo.html
US plans massive data sweep
Little-known data-collection system could troll news, blogs, even e-mails. Will it go too far?
By Mark Clayton | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
"The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.
"The system - parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development - is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government's latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism.
[snip]
The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE). Only a few public documents mention it. ADVISE is a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and
Assessment" portfolio. The TVTA received nearly $50 million in federal funding this year.
[snip]
"A major part of ADVISE involves data-mining - or "dataveillance," as some call it. It means sifting through data to look for patterns".
[snip]
"What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system would then store it as "entities" -
linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 DHS conference in Alexandria, Va."
[snip]
"But ADVISE and related DHS technologies aim to do much more, according to Joseph Kielman, manager of the TVTA portfolio. The key is not merely to identify terrorists, or sift for key words, but to identify critical patterns in data that illumine their motives and intentions, he wrote in a presentation at a November conference in Richland, Wash.
"For example: Is a burst of Internet traffic between a few people the plotting of terrorists, or just bloggers arguing? ADVISE algorithms would try to determine that before flagging the data pattern for a human analyst's review. At least a few pieces of ADVISE are already operational.
[snip]
"Yet the scope of ADVISE - its stage of development, cost, and most other details - is so obscure that critics say it poses a major privacy challenge.
[snip]
"Privacy concerns have torpedoed federal data-mining efforts in the past. In 2002, news reports revealed that the Defense Department was working on Total Information Awareness, a project aimed at collecting and sifting vast amounts of personal and government data for clues to
terrorism. An uproar caused Congress to cancel the TIA program a year later. ADVISE "looks very much like TIA," Mr. Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes in an e-mail. "There's the same emphasis on broad collection and pattern analysis."