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Here is a very interesting article by Tom Owad, who has done relatively simple "data mining" on Amazon wish lists to show what can be found by a much more powerful government data mining. Using a pair of five-year-old computers, two home D.S.L. connections, 42 hours of computer time, and five man-hours, he was able to get documents describing the reading preferences of 260,000 U.S. citizens. (Editor).

Data Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists
by Tom Owad on January 4, 2006 - 7:37pm. Security

Vast deposits of personal information sit in databases across the internet. Terms used in phone conversations have become the grounds for federal investigation. Reputable organizations like the Catholic Worker, Greenpeace, and the Vegan Community Project, have come under scrutiny by FBI "counterterrorism" agents.

"Data mining" of all that information and communication is at the heart of the furor over the recent disclosure of government snooping. U.S. President George W. Bush and his aides have said his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to monitoring international phone and e-mail communications linked to people with connections to al-Qaeda. What has not been acknowledged, according to the Times, is that NSA technicians combed large amounts of phone and Internet traffic seeking patterns pointing to terrorism suspects.

"Some officials described the program as a large data mining operation, the Times said, and described it as much larger than the White House has acknowledged." (Reuters)

Combining a data mining operation with the Patriot Act's power to access information makes it all too easy for the federal government to violate the Constitution's prohibition against unreasonable search. Ars Technica has an article, The new technology at the root of the NSA wiretap scandal, that describes the ease with which widespread wiretapping can now be implemented.

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Today, it is increasingly easy to monitor ideas. And then track them back to people. Most of us don't have access to the databases, software, or computing power of the NSA, FBI, and other government agencies. But an individual with access to the internet can still develop a fairly sophisticated profile of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens using free and publicly available resources. Here's an example.

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Amazon wishlists lets anyone bookmark books for later purchase. By default these lists are public and available to anybody who searches by name. If the wishlist creator specifies a shipping address, someone else can even purchase the book on Amazon and have it shipped directly as a gift. The wishlist creator's city and state are made public on the wishlist, but the street address remains private. Amazon's popularity has created a vast database of wishlists. No index of all wishlists is available, but it remains possible to view all wishlists by people of a particular first name. A recent search for people named Mark returned 124,887 publicly viewable wishlists.

See the rest at www.applefritter.com/bannedbooks .