Briefs

Congress' attempt to curtail terrorism information research also results in the elimination of projects that built safeguards against data-mining tools.

BY MICHAEL J. SNIFFEN - Associated Press

March 15, 2004. WASHINGTON - When Congress curtailed Pentagon research that it feared would ensnare innocent Americans in the terrorism fight, it also allowed the Bush administration to eliminate two projects to protect citizens' privacy from futuristic tools.

As a result, the government is pressing ahead quietly with research into high-powered computer data-mining technology without the two most advanced privacy protections developed for those terror-fighting tools.

''It's very inconsistent what they've done,'' said Teresa Lunt of the Palo Alto Research Center and head of one of the two government-funded privacy projects eliminated last fall.

One privacy project worked with Poindexter's Genisys program, which scanned government and commercial records for terrorist planning. The other was part of his Bio-ALIRT program, which scanned private health records for evidence of biological attacks.

Last fall's Intelligence Authorization Act approved continued research on the type of powerful data-mining Poindexter envisioned but said ``the policies and procedures necessary to safeguard individual liberties and privacy should occur concurrently with the development of these analytic tools, not as an afterthought.''

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