Government pulls plug on two invasive programs
(No Ratings Yet)Since 9/11 the federal government has been doing it’s utmost to protect us from ourselves. Thankfully however, the plug has been pulled on two controversial data-mining programs citing massive privacy invasions.
The first program was called ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement), brought to you by Michael Chertoff (a possible candidate for replacing Alberto Gonzales) and the Department of Homeland Security. The CS Monitor reports that ADVISE was “designed to ingest information from scores of databases, blogs, e-mail traffic, intelligence reports, and other sources”. Apparently the DHS missed the memo about the constitution (that it indeed exists). The project was discontinued after a report released by the Office of the Inspector General citing “major breakdowns in the system” in regards to privacy and erroneous information. (Read the Full Story)
The Pentagon’s TALON (Threat and Local Observation Notices) program was shut down last week. Described as a military neighborhood watch, this program has been used to monitor “local peace activists and students opposed to military recruiting”. (Read the Full Story)
I may be wrong, but I always thought that Republicans were supposed to be against this kind of thing?
on August 28th, 2007 at 7:34 pm
It is funny to see that the only reason they shut down ADVISE was due to the privacy issue and the cost of compliance. Boy, I wonder how many more databases are out there that haven’t been detected.
Another thing that is scary is the conservative that said that its okay to surrender some civil liberties in order to be safe. Hmm. Yeah. To some, being on a Pentagon watch list without knowing it is okay. But I think for the majority, if they knew, would disagree.