July 11th, 2007
What's your score? FBI STAR program uses to data to evaluate terrorism risk
Would you trust a computer to identify potential terrorists? The FBI is working on a computer-profiling system that would do just that and not everyone is happy about it, reports the Washington Post.
The System to Assess Risk, or STAR, set to be tested next year, will function in much the same way as a credit bureau rates consumer spending, scoring individuals on the likelihood they are a terrorist threat. The Justice Department said it is an effort to automate what analysts have been doing manually.
“STAR does not label anyone a terrorist,” the report said. “Only individuals considered emergent foreign threats (as opposed to other criminal activity such as U.S. bank robbery threats) will be analyzed.”
Some lawmakers have expressed concern that the new profiling system will allow the government to mine personal data without enough oversight.
“The Bush administration has expanded the use of this technology, often in secret, to collect and sift through Americans’ most sensitive personal information,” said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which received a copy of the report on data-mining initiatives.
There is precedent for scrutinizing profiling programs. The CAPPS II program that screened airplane passengers, and Total Information Awareness program, which collected personal and financial data, were two program that had to be revamped due to civil liberty concerns.
The STAR program bases a scores on whether there is a name match on the terrorist watch list, or if a person was from a particular country plus other factors. High scores are then run through a variety of different data source, as well as the terrorist screening center database, which contains hundreds of thousands of names.
Privacy expert David Sobel, senior counsel for the nonprofit advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, questions the accuracy of the collected data.
“If we can’t assess the accuracy of the information being fed into the system, it’s very hard to assess the effectiveness of the system.”
