The Bush Administration cares deeply about the mining industry. Indeed, the President has indicated that he will spare no expense in supporting the mining industry. Unfortunately for privacy advocates, it is the data mining industry that Mr. Bush is so enamored of. In case you remain blissfully unaware, “data mining is the process of using computer technology to extract the knowledge that’s buried in enormous volumes of undigested information. Trillions of bits of raw data are culled from telephone calls, e-mails, the Internet, airlines, car rentals, stores, credit card records and a myriad of other sources spawned by the information age.â€? Data mining has been more in the news, of late, due to recent revelations that, not long after the September 11th attacks, the President authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to initiate a domestic surveillance program. (The master spin artists at the White House have subsequently begun to use the term, “terrorist surveillance program,â€? instead. You say to-may-to; I say to-mah-to. Let’s call the whole thing off.) In response to these revelations, on January 23rd, Senator Russ Feingold sent a letter to National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, NSA Director Keith Alexander, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in which he said:

“One element of the NSA’s domestic spying program that has gotten too little attention is the government’s reportedly widespread use of data mining technology to analyze the communications of ordinary Americans. Today I am calling on the Director of National Intelligence, the Defense Secretary and the Director of the NSA to explain whether and how the government is using data mining technology, and what authority it claims for doing so.

Data mining is a new, unproven and intrusive technology in the counterterrorism context, and we need to know how it is being used, how effective it is in finding patterns of terrorist activity, and whether there are sufficient safeguards to protect the privacy of Americans. We can and must fight terrorism aggressively without infringing on the privacy of law-abiding Americans.”

To the best of my knowledge, Senator Feingold has yet to receive a sufficient response to his concerns. Perhaps if he had included the words jihad, al-Qa’ida, explosion, nuclear plant, terror, and infidels in his letter, the NSA would have gotten back to him sooner. Perhaps now I shall be hearing from them. I understand the weather is rather balmy at Guantanamo this time of year.