Briefs

Sep 23, 2003. Millions of JetBlue passenger records were used in a military effort whose methods closely resemble those employed in the notorious Terrorism Information Awareness �berdatabase program, the Army confirmed Monday.

Last week, defense contractor Torch Concepts came under heavy scrutiny after Wired News revealed that the company had crunched fliers' private data without their knowledge.

On Monday, Army spokesman Maj. Gary Tallman said the information was used by Torch Concepts to test a prototype of a data-mining system designed to screen out terrorists who might want to infiltrate or attack Army bases worldwide.

According to a corporate press release from May 8, 2002, the Torch-built system would identify "abnormal events or activities that may include rebel actions before damaging events occur." To do this, the contractor would apply "intelligent pattern recognition in identifying latent relationships and behaviors that may help point to potential terrorist threats."

"Look at how we found out about this, only because one company was foolish enough to speak publicly about it," Tien added. "We should put the brakes on all these data-mining programs, and have a serious national conversation, because travel data is just one example of the many kinds of data every data-mining operation wants to suck in from private businesses."