Data Mining and the Security-Liberty Debate

[madmusic]

Abstract:
In this essay, written for a symposium on surveillance for the University of Chicago Law Review, I examine some common difficulties in the way that liberty is balanced against security in the context of data mining. Countless discussions about the trade-offs between security and liberty begin by taking a security proposal and then weighing it against what it would cost our civil liberties. Often, the liberty interests are cast as individual rights and balanced against the security interests, which are cast in terms of the safety of society as a whole. Courts and commentators defer to the government's assertions about the effectiveness of the security interest. In the context of data mining, the liberty interest is limited by narrow understandings of privacy that neglect to account for many privacy problems. As a result, the balancing concludes with a victory in favor of the security interest. But as I argue, important dimensions of data mining's security benefits require more scrutiny, and the privacy concerns are significantly greater than currently acknowledged. These problems have undermined the balancing process and skewed the results toward the security side of the scale.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=990030

[madmusic]

1. the MATRIX

Footnote 7:

7 For more details on the MATRIX program, see Jacqueline Klosek, The War on Privacy
51–53 (Praeger 2007); GAO, Data Mining: Federal Efforts Cover a Wide Range of Uses, GAO-04-548,
5 (May 2004), online at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04548.pdf (visited Jan 12, 2008).

[madmusic]

2. We're all going to die! Uh, maybe not... yet.

For example, many people fear being killed in a terrorist attack, but based on statistics
from terrorism in the United States, the risk of dying from terrorism is
miniscule. According to political scientist John Mueller,

{e}ven with the September 11 attacks included in the count . . .
the number of Americans killed by international terrorism since
the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began its ac-
counting) is about the same as the number killed over the same
period by lightning, or by accident-causing deer, or by severe al-lergic
reactions to peanuts.

Add up the eight deadliest terrorist attacks in US history, and
they amount to fewer than four thousand fatalities. In contrast, flu and
pneumonia deaths are estimated to be around sixty thousand per
year. Another forty thousand die in auto accidents each year. Based
on our experience with terrorism thus far, the risk of dying from ter-
rorism is very low on the relative scale of fatal risks. (p. 351)