Briefs

By Alice Lipowicz, Washington technology, Feb 4, 2008

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has established a new system for automatically discovering links in information from various databases for the purpose of investigating people suspected of violating customs and immigration laws.

The system, named ICE Pattern Analysis and Information Collection (ICEPIC), presents some privacy risks to individuals whose personal information is being investigated. However, those risks have been mitigated, according to a Privacy Impact Assessment released by the Homeland Security Department.

ICEPIC looks for unexpected new links between individuals and groups among databases collected by law enforcement agencies and supplemented by information from commercial databases. The system looks for patterns and links between databases, similar to what data mining programs do, but it is not a data mining program in the privacy impact assessment.

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