Department of Homeland Security Dumps $42 Million Failed Data-Mining Project
DHL
(Image is in the Public Domain)
In what has become the norm and not the exception, an expensive Department of Defense project has been shown to be a complete failure wasting millions of dollars and all of our time. What makes this story interesting is it was due in no small part to the efforts of the Government Accountability office that this project was scrapped. They discovered that the program was using live data on American citizens instead of dummy data and that none of the required privacy protections had been put in place. Go figure.
Most frightening is this line:
The privacy office concluded that although required privacy analyses were ignored, the Privacy Act was not technically violated because the live data were covered by privacy notices issued earlier for other programs that originally gathered the information.Which demonstrates the danger of taking data for one reason, but using for a completely different reason altogether.
Tags: Accountability, Big Brother, Data Mining, DHS