Briefs

The Associated Press, March 9, 2007

HOOVER, Alabama: A new Homeland Security program aims to analyze existing, legally collected computer data, not gather new personal information on U.S. citizens, Secretary Michael Chertoff said in defending the program from congressional critics.

The project, still in the pilot stage, will help investigators understand evidence gathered through subpoenas but won't troll computers for new, private information, Chertoff said in an interview Friday with The Associated Press.

"It's an experiment to see how you can better analyze data that you already have, that you've already legally collected, to see if you can understand it, sort it and make use of it more readily than simply doing it manually," Chertoff said.

Called ADVISE -- for Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement -- the program can be used to find "relationships or patterns" from information including financial and telephone records, he said.

"This is not a program that sucks up or collects information from out on the Internet or anything like that," Chertoff told AP during an appearance in Alabama. "It's not data mining."

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