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Plans to collect info on U.S. citizens do not pose privacy problems, lawmakers say.

Grant Gross, IDG News Service Wednesday, May 07, 2003

WASHINGTON -- Leaders of two much-criticized projects that privacy advocates fear will collect massive amounts of data on U.S. residents defended those projects before the U.S. Congress Tuesday, saying the projects will be much more limited in scope than opponents fear.

James Loy, director of the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and Anthony Tether, director of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), countered concerns that the TSA's proposed Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II) nor DARPA's Total Information Awareness research project would house new volumes of data that could be later used to check up on U.S. citizens.

Instead, CAPPS II will run an airline passenger's name, address, phone number, and birth date through a sophisticated data analysis process to determine if that passenger presented a terrorism risk, Loy said. And DARPA is simply providing other agencies such as the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation with the tools to mine data for important trends, Tether said, but the agency isn't planning to collect data itself.

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Instead of collecting and analyzing huge amounts of data, the goal of TIA, Tether said, is to put together likely terrorist attack scenarios, then match those models against activities in public databases. Instead of searching databases for unknown patterns in large databases, which leads to a lot of false positives, TIA's data-mining component would start with those scenarios created by experts, he said.

Here is the full story from PCworld.