In another stunning revelation this morning, James Bamford, writing for the New York Times, cites a 2004 General Accounting Office report asserting that the majority of US federal government departments have datamining projects underway:
“[A]ccording to a 2004 General Accounting Office report, the Bush administration and the Pentagon continued to rely heavily on data-mining techniques. ‘Our survey of 128 federal departments and agencies on their use of data mining,’ the report said, ‘shows that 52 agencies are using or are planning to use data mining. These departments and agencies reported 199 data-mining efforts, of which 68 are planned and 131 are operational.’ Of these uses, the report continued, ‘the Department of Defense reported the largest number of efforts.’”
This, of course, is all after the federal government abandoned its Total Information Awareness datamining project after knowledge of it was made public. That ill-fated project was run by John Poindexter, Reagan’s national security advisor who cooked up the plan to illegally sell weapons to Iran and divert the proceeds to support anti-governmental forces in Nicaragua.
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