Electronic snooping by federal goverment may safeguard liberty - and also threaten it. If the authorities can and do collect such bits of data, piecing them together offers the tantalising prospect of foiling terrorist conspiracies. It also raises the spectre of criminalising or constraining innocent people's eccentric but legal behaviour.
The staggering, and fast growing, information-crunching capabilities of data mining technology broaden the definition of what is considered suspicious.
Facts.
>FAST, a Norwegian company bought by Microsoft in 2008 for USD1.3billion, collects data from more than 300 sources( including the web) for national data mining programmes in a dozen of countries in Asia, Europe and North America.
>Swedish Parliament in June 2008, voted in law a data mining programmes strongly backed by defence ministry, will provide sweeping powers to monitor international electronic messages and telephone traffic.
> Companies, and especially credit- reporting firms, generally enjoy more latitude than goverment bodies do in making personal information available to third parties. They find "intelligence agencies *" are eager clients. Note*: Intelligence agencies in US, Canada, China, Germany, Israel, Singapore and Taiwan.
> Narayanan Kulathuramaiyer, an expert in data mining at UNIMAS, a Malaysian university, says companies are selling database access to intelligence and law enforcement agencies " at a level you would not even imagine".
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