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The many news stories criticizing Pentagon's "Total Information Awareness" program usually describe it as a "data-mining" program. See, e.g. Infoworld article "Anti data mining amendment moves forward" (see http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/02/13/HNantidata_1.html).

You can find many more such examples by searching Google News (http://news.google.com/).

While there are legitimate privacy concerns about Total Information Awareness, I feel that the criticism of TIA may cause a backlash against "data mining" in general. Data mining has been used in many areas of business and science, but the current association with TIA may cause data mining to be perceived by many as "evil" and a threat to civil liberties.

The current poll asks:

Is "data mining" being perceived as a threat to civil liberties, because of its role in Total Information Awareness (TIA)?

Please vote on www.kdnuggets.com.

P.S. TIA program is currently only proposes research, and I don't think it makes sense to ban it. Yes, there are concerns of privacy. However, the issue of main concern is gathering all the personal information in one database. Once that is done, data mining is just one approach to looking at this data. Banning "data mining" makes as much sense as banning use of arithmetic addition.

Thankfully, if data mining is banned, we will still have the untainted "knowledge discovery" term as a substitute (:-).

Gregory