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FCW, May 12, 2011 The Office of the Director of National Intelligence performed no data mining in 2010,
but at least two programs in development could be used for data mining in the future, according to the office's most recent
Data Mining Report.
Under a 2007 law, the office is required to provide an annual data-mining report to Congress. The Federation of American Scientists published the most recent report online May 10.
The law defines data mining as
pattern-based queries of one or more databases that seek to identify anomalous events and patterns, are not subject-based and use no personal identifiers.
In its most recent report, ODNI said its techniques do not fall under that definition because their queries generally start with a known subject.
Read more.
See also Federation of American Scientist blog:
ODNI Describes Emerging Tools for Data Fusion, Analysis
Although the following 2 programs did not perform "data mining" as defined above, they were reported in the interest of transparency.
A new program called DataSphere is intended "to aid in the discovery of unknown terrorism relationships and the identification of previously undetected terrorist and terrorism information" through analysis of communication networks and travel patterns.Catalyst "will enable data fusion/analytic programs to share disparate repositories with each other, to disambiguate and cross-correlate the different agencies' holdings, and to discover and visualize relationship/network links, geospatial patterns, temporal patterns and related correlations."
Here is another viewpoint:
Government Developing Data Mining Tools To Fight Terrorism, InformationWeek, May 12, 2011.
Report details data analysis software developed by intelligence agencies to connect the dots between suspected terrorists.