Green Arrow
05-15-2014, 03:14 PM
Via Politico:
Far from cracking down on the monitoring of consumer information, the Obama administration has often sought to leverage the power of big data — sometimes running afoul of privacy advocates.
“Big data technology stands to improve nearly all the services the public sector delivers,” the recent White House report on big data concluded.
Among the administration's initiatives:
• The FBI is building a huge facial recognition database -- which will also include palm prints and iris scans -- to augment its fingerprint collection. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports it will hold as many as 52 million facial images by the end of next year, including pictures of people who have never been arrested.
• The Treasury Department has launched a program to scan several government databases -- and, in the future, perhaps commercial databases as well -- for information about individuals due to receive federal payments. The aim: To identify anyone who might be ineligible to receive the payment, or might be suspected of committing fraud, before the check goes in the mail.
• The Defense Department is considering mining commercial databases as well, to scan for worrisome information about employees and contractors who hold classified clearance. Most are officially vetted only every five to 10 years; the Pentagon is eager for more frequent checks that could disclose drug arrests, domestic violence charges, financial troubles or other red flags.
The Education Department has also been a major proponent of big data. It has used policy and financial incentives, including more than $500 million in direct grants, to prod states to build longitudinal databases that will track students' progress from pre-K through high school and in some cases, into college and the workforce. States will mine the data to spot patterns; they might, for instance, be able to identify behaviors in 6-year-olds that indicate the child has an elevated risk of dropping out of high school a decade later.
Evil marches on.
http://samuwell.com/pictures/statism.jpg
Far from cracking down on the monitoring of consumer information, the Obama administration has often sought to leverage the power of big data — sometimes running afoul of privacy advocates.
“Big data technology stands to improve nearly all the services the public sector delivers,” the recent White House report on big data concluded.
Among the administration's initiatives:
• The FBI is building a huge facial recognition database -- which will also include palm prints and iris scans -- to augment its fingerprint collection. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports it will hold as many as 52 million facial images by the end of next year, including pictures of people who have never been arrested.
• The Treasury Department has launched a program to scan several government databases -- and, in the future, perhaps commercial databases as well -- for information about individuals due to receive federal payments. The aim: To identify anyone who might be ineligible to receive the payment, or might be suspected of committing fraud, before the check goes in the mail.
• The Defense Department is considering mining commercial databases as well, to scan for worrisome information about employees and contractors who hold classified clearance. Most are officially vetted only every five to 10 years; the Pentagon is eager for more frequent checks that could disclose drug arrests, domestic violence charges, financial troubles or other red flags.
The Education Department has also been a major proponent of big data. It has used policy and financial incentives, including more than $500 million in direct grants, to prod states to build longitudinal databases that will track students' progress from pre-K through high school and in some cases, into college and the workforce. States will mine the data to spot patterns; they might, for instance, be able to identify behaviors in 6-year-olds that indicate the child has an elevated risk of dropping out of high school a decade later.
Evil marches on.
http://samuwell.com/pictures/statism.jpg