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LOS ANGELES - Officials will look into how electronic data mining might help Los Angeles County root out and prevent fraud in public assistance programs. The Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday to study the possibility of use of data-mining technology and of training public assistance staff members in fraud prevention techniques. " 'Data mining' is a $10 term for collaboration between agencies and information sharing," said Tony Bell, aide to 5th District Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich. Using data mining, the county would be able to check if applicants for county-administered aid programs are also getting assistance from other programs or...

Having Won a Pulitzer for Exposing Data Mining, Times Now Eager to Do Its Own Data Mining by Keach Hagey May 1st, 2007 Barely a year after their reporters won a Pulitzer prize for exposing data mining of ordinary citizens by a government spy agency, New York Times officials had some exciting news for stockholders last week: The Times company plans to do its own data mining of ordinary citizens, in the name of online profits. The news didn't make everyone all googly-eyed. In fact, some people at the paper's annual stockholders meeting in the New Amsterdam Theatre exchanged confused...

TESTIMONY Subcommittee on Homeland Security (Senate Appropriations Committee) Publication Date: September 14, 2006 Mr. Chairman, thank you for the opportunity to testify before the Subcommittee on Homeland Security regarding American and British laws for investigating and detaining suspected terrorists. I am a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. From 2001 to 2003, I served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, where I worked on issues involving national security, foreign relations, and terrorism. My academic writing on these subjects can be found in two books, one published last...

NATIONAL SEX OFFENDER REGISTRY New Hires Data Has Potential for Updating Addresses of Convicted Sex Offenders ... To help track the location of sex offenders, law enforcement officials have turned to other sources of information, such as state departments of motor vehicles and commercial databases. Previous GAO work suggests that the National Directory of New Hires (NDNH) has been useful for the purposes of verifying eligibility for federal benefit programs and collecting debt owed to the federal government, and is a timely source of information.4 The NDNH is a database maintained by the Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) within...

Don Fullman finished off a cinnamon roll and iced tea at the St. Louis Bread Co. in Winchester on Friday morning and talked about some of the things he's looked up recently on the Internet. Bile duct cancer, aneurysms, substance abuse. "If you took that out of context . . . it would look like I'm a wreck and I'm not going to live much longer," said Fullman, a self-described healthy 60-year-old from Ballwin, whose laptop computer sat open on the table. "If that's winding up under my name personally, that's a little scary." Many people might not realize that...

http://www.news.com/ NSA's data mining explained By Declan McCullagh http://marketwatch-cnet.com.com, marketwatch-cnet.com.com/NSAs+data+mining+explained/2100-1028_3-6071780.html Story last modified Sun May 14 16:36:34 PDT 2006 Capitol Hill politicians reacted angrily this week to a new report about how the National Security agency is involved in not merely surveillance of phone calls, but also an extensive data mining program. "We need to know what our government is doing in its activities that spy upon Americans," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat. Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania vowed to hold hearings to get to the bottom of how the NSA's data mining works and whether Americans'...

Does anyone imagine the NSA is interested in what the average American said to his grandmother on the telephone last night? In fact, the NSA is not eavesdropping at all on the average American's conversations. It is collecting records of which phone numbers placed calls to which other numbers and when. No names, addresses or details of conversations are included. The NSA says this anonymous "data mining" allows the agency to study patterns of calling, the better to identify who may be involved with terrorist groups. If Number A places a lot of calls to Number B who likewise calls...

Latest News --EPIC Urges Scrutiny of Proposed Federal Profiling Agency. In a letter (pdf) to a House subcommittee, EPIC urged careful scrutiny of the Department of Homeland Security's proposed Office of Screening Coordination and Operations. This office would oversee vast databases of digital fingerprints and photographs, eye scans and personal information from millions of American citizens and lawful foreign visitors. Homeland Security has announced that the office's operations would be conducted in a manner that safeguards civil liberties, but the agency has not yet explained how it proposes to protect privacy rights or ensure accountability. For more information, visit EPIC's...

May 12, 2006 — Americans by nearly a 2-1 ratio call the surveillance of telephone records an acceptable way for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, expressing broad unconcern even if their own calling patterns are scrutinized. Lending support to the administration's defense of its anti-terrorism intelligence efforts, 63 percent in this ABC News/Washington Post poll say the secret program, disclosed Thursday by USA Today, is justified, while far fewer, 35 percent, call it unjustified. Indeed, 51 percent approve of the way President Bush is handling the protection of privacy rights, while 47 percent disapprove — hardly a...

Earlier this year, Congress launched an investigation into the sale of cell phone records after the FBI and Chicago Police warned that Web-based firms could sell their officers' calling lists to criminals. Now some of the companies under investigation for fraud are telling Congress they have provided personal information to the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. On Monday, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., blasted the FBI after learning that Advanced Research Inc. sent Congress a letter saying the firm did work for the bureau. Attorney General Lisa Madigan has sued Advanced Research for allegedly using fraud to obtain Illinois consumers'...

...But this case management and data mining software, developed in the early 1980s by a small Washington D.C. company, Inslaw Inc., had proven itself to be a perfect intelligence tool... Stolen by ruse from its owner, Inslaw Inc., the software was hacked and provided with a "trap door", ... a Trojan Horse hacker’s trick, that enabled the retrieval of information from the foreign intelligence services and banks it had been sold to on behalf of Israeli and U.S. intelligence. Without the knowledge of the software’s owner, and in violation of copyright laws, the PROMIS software was sold to over 40...

HILLARY GURU PLANS DATABASE TO RIVAL DNC; SOROS FINANCED Tue Mar 07 2006 20:38:16 ET A group of well-connected Democrats led by a former top aide to Bill and Hillary Clinton is raising millions of dollars to start a private firm -- that plans to compile huge amounts of data on Americans to identify Democratic voters. The effort by Harold Ickes, a deputy chief of staff in the Clinton White House and an adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., is prompting intense behind-the-scenes debate in Democratic circles, the WASHINGTON POST is planning to report on Wednesday. Officials at the...

The principals in the Able Danger story have filed suit to restrain the Department of Defense from retaliating against Tony Shaffer and to allow these witnesses to retain counsel during the closed hearings that Congress has scheduled into the data-mining program. Mark Zaid, representing Shaffer as well as contractor J. D. Smith, filed the suit on Monday against the DoD, DIA, the Army, and their attorneys in the DC district court. I've copied the text into the extended entry of this post. Most of those who have followed Able Danger will not be surprised by the allegations in the lawsuit....

I've created an Able Danger Podcast blog to generate a podcast feed so folks can subscribe to this feed and easily obtain any Able Danger audio (mp3) files. Here is the podcast feed for the Able Danger podcasts. The link to this feed is easy to find at the top left corner of my main blog, QT Monster, just above the Able Danger blog roll. Folks can subscribe to this podcast feed through iTunes. From the iTunes interface pull down the Advanced menu, click on subscribe to podcast, and in the dialogue box paste the URL for this podcast feed:...

Sources close to the ongoing Department of Defense investigation into the controversial Able Danger data mining intelligence program, which purportedly identified Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers a year before the worst terror attacks in US history, say the mystery person who actually obtained a much-disputed photograph of Atta for the Able Danger team has now been identified. Ever since the Pentagon-ordered destruction in 2000 of 2.5 terabytes of data unearthed by Able Danger – allegedly including a chart featuring Atta’s photograph that revealed terrorist links and patterns when clicked on – skeptics have long raised doubt about the...

The first 20 minutes or so of the Able Danger conference call was previously posted here. The next three audio clips are here, here and here. Attending this conference call with Congressman Weldon were: AJ Strata from The Strata-Sphere, Dana from Common Sense Political Thought, Curt from Flopping Aces, Mike of Able Danger Blog, QT Monster, Rory O’Connor, Pierre from Pink Flamingo Bar & Grill, Bluto from Jawa Report and The Dread Pundit Bluto.

Some traditional intelligence officials, however, seemed either skeptical or jealous of LIWA's capability. At one conference, "Able Danger" analysts identified four major al-Qaida hubs - the Middle East, East Africa, Balkans and the Far East - in about 90 minutes."Because we weren't an intelligence organization, we got a lot of bad press," he said. "Folks thought we were running fast and loose with the data."By April, the "Able Danger" team was told to end its support of SOCOM. During the month's long work stoppage, SOCOM's patience ran out, and the military command transferred the work to a Raytheon facility in...

Able Danger identified Mohammad Atta and at least 2 other 9-11 hijackers more than a year before the 9-11 attacks. Why was the data that connected Mohammad Atta as a possible terrorist threat to the United States destroyed, and why wasn't this information shared with the FBI so the 9-11 attacks might have been prevented? 1. Dr. Stephen A. Cambone, U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, explains that there wasn't any prohibition against sharing Able Danger information with the FBI. One of Dr. Cambone's colleagues says, "...we share in Army intelligence and DoD intelligence, we share information with the FBI...

China Study Rocks The Hill and Unleashes The Purge: While Cambone tried to link the data purge to this 90-day rule, Weldon and the other witnesses (with first hand knowledge) pointed to the LIWA China Study that was being done in parallel to the Able Danger study. I have stated all along this was the lynchpin, the source of all later cover ups and mistakes and lost opportunities. We all know the story so I will not repeat it here, but what we learned from the hearings is how far up this went. Weldon let slip that the initial China...

No you're right Tony, and the significance here is that the FBI Director back then, Louis Freeh said in October of last year on national television, that if he had had the Able Danger information the FBI might well have been able to stop the hijacking. In our hearing past week, and we had both classified and unclassified, we had five people that testified under oath that they believed the same thing. That if the data they collected, that if the analysis they did had been able to be passed to the FBI, they agree with Louis Freeh, that would...