Two years ago, public concern over the proposed Total Information Awareness datamining program led Congress to defund the program. At the time, the thinking was that while the private sector and the international community was free to gather, scan, and assess large databases for all sorts of purposes, it was problematic to have the United States government trying to do that here in the United States.
I’m a bit puzzled, then, by a front page article in the Washington Post announcing with considerable alarm that a new company has formed: Global Information Group, a company that plans on doing data gathering and mining for the private sector out of the Bahamas. The company has hired a former government official, Ben Bell, who used to be the Director of the Transportation Security Administration’s Office of National Risk Assessment. According to the Post:
The company plans to do such things as assess foreign job candidates for risk, conduct background checks on cargo ship crews or take stock of people who want to open bank accounts in the United States, documents and interviews show. It also will provide something the company calls “terrorist risk identity assessment,” a company document shows.
Why is the new company troublesome? Well, if TIA was problematic because it was a U.S. government program that would operate in the United States, the Post article suggests that the new company is troublesome because it is not a U.S. government program and it would not operate in the United States:
Legal and privacy specialists said the company raises troubling new questions about the ability of computers — in both the government and private sectors — to collect and analyze personal information for homeland security. These critics said Global’s initiative echoes the aims of the troubled government passenger-screening system, as well as another controversial program at the Defense Department that was shut down by Congress called Total Information Awareness.
An important difference from those programs, these critics said, is that Global operates in private hands, offshore and beyond the oversight that stymied the government programs. “As a business matter, there are layers of legal protections and public relations protections they can get by going offshore,” Peter P. Swire, a law professor at Ohio State University and privacy counselor in the Clinton administration. “It might meet business interests, but not necessarily the public interest.”
Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, said he worries that Global will become a contractor for government work that government officials could not get backing to do themselves. “He is making a highly controversial program more controversial,” Lewis said about Bell. “Now he’s doing it offshore and making money off of it.”
UPDATE: This page provides some context. It explains that the author of the Post story, Robert O’Harrow, “has carved out a data privacy beat” and has links to many other stories O’Harrow has written for the Post that raise the same privacy concerns.
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