More than 1.5 billion government and private sector records
about US citizens and foreigners are stored in an FBI database,
declassified documents have revealed.
The database is kept at the FBI's National Security Branch
Analysis Center (NSAC) near Washington, according to the documents
acquired under a freedom of information request by US magazine
Wired.
Data has been drawn from a wide variety of sources, including
records of international travel, hotel bookings, car rentals,
department store transactions and active aircraft pilots.
The FBI data mining system brings the US government closer than
ever to implementing the total information awareness system
proposed by the Pentagon after the September 11 attacks,
reports
said.
Such a system would be designed to correlate data from a large
number of different sources to automatically identify potential
terrorists and other threats.
But the proposal has been criticised by privacy groups as
ineffective and invasive. They say the declassified documents show
that the government is going ahead with the plan in secret and
without strict independent supervision by public bodies.
Critics have expressed concern that the US government is using
an unproven technology that could give false positives that would
subject innocent people to unnecessary scrutiny.
Strict enforcement of data protection legislation is the only
way to guard against secret FBI-style databases of personal
information, says a UK-based security expert.
Peter Sommer, professor of security at the London School of
Economics, said huge amounts of information are collected by
commercial organisations as part of 'legitimate customer
profiling'.
"The problem is that it is only rigorous enforcement of data
protection legislation which prevents them being used to form a
large data mining operation by intelligence agencies," he said.
Sommer said this was the reason for that it is important for
privacy watchdogs like the UK's Information Commissioner's Office
(ICO) to have sufficient powers and resources.
According to data mining firm
Detica, most people do not
realise how many
organisations are collecting their "digital footprints" as they
roam the internet and communicate with their friends.
Anthony Golledge, head of Detica's technical consulting practice
said that technology was changing so fast that most people were not
aware of how many "digital footprints" they leave as they surf the
internet, travel and use their mobile phones.