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Reporting from Washington - When your doctor writes you a prescription, that's just between you, your doctor and maybe your health insurance company -- right? Wrong. As things stand now, the pharmaceutical companies that make those prescription drugs are looking over the doctor's shoulder to keep track of how many prescriptions for each drug the physician is writing. By obtaining data from pharmacies and health insurers, the drug companies learn the prescribing habits of thousands of doctors. That information has become not just a powerful sales and marketing tool for the pharmaceutical industry but also a source of growing concern...

Recently declassified documents obtained by Wired magazine reveal a massive Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data mining operation. It already possesses over 1.5 billion records from government and private-sector sources. That figure is expected by the FBI to balloon to over 6 billion within a few years. And it is not just terrorists they are after.  According to the documents, the National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) is being used to pursue multiple types of non-terrorism domestic investigations. It is also meant to be able to sort through the data — everything from health and travel records to credit card...

Progressive Insurance Companies in Texas is launching a unique program in Texas which may save you money on your car insurance, but has civil libertarians worried, 1200 WOAI news reports. Progressive is offering discounts starting today to motorists who are willing to have a device placed into their cars which will notify the company about the customer’s driving habits. "It doesn't tell where you're driving, it just tells them a little about your driving habits," insurance industry spokesman Jerry Johns told 1200 WOAI news. Johns says the system is in place in other states, but the Progressive attempt is the...

Innocent-seeming questionnaires, tests, and surveys are increasingly being disseminated by government officials so that they have complete histories on every citizen. At this writing, Republican Congresswoman Virginia Foxx of North Carolina is busy apologizing for her politically incorrect gaffe in arguing against legislation that would expand federal hate-crime laws to include sexual orientation. She pointed to the infamous Matthew Shepard case as a “hoax” inasmuch as Shepard’s killers appeared to have been interested in drugs, not sexual-identity issues. Were Foxx a teenager today, she would be spared the necessity of balancing her conservative views on sexuality against the left’s Orwellian...

HARRISON BROWN, an 18-year-old freshman majoring in mathematics at M.I.T., didn’t need to do complex calculations to figure out he liked this deal: in exchange for letting researchers track his every move, he receives a free smartphone. Now, when he dials another student, researchers know. When he sends an e-mail or text message, they also know. When he listens to music, they know the song. Every moment he has his Windows Mobile smartphone with him, they know where he is, and who’s nearby. Mr. Brown and about 100 other students living in Random Hall at M.I.T. have agreed to swap...

MADISON, Wis. - A landlord snooped on tenants to find out information about their finances. A woman repeatedly accessed her ex-boyfriend's account after a difficult breakup. Another obtained her child's father's address so she could serve him court papers. All worked for Wisconsin's largest utility, where employees routinely accessed confidential information about acquaintances, local celebrities and others from its massive customer database. Documents obtained by The Associated Press in an employment case involving Milwaukee-based WE Energies shine a light on a common practice in the utilities, telecommunications and accounting industries, privacy experts say. Vast computer databases give curious employees the...

You'd think that in a slowing economy, companies would be trying to hold on to every potential customer. Not DirecTV. The satellite operator is weeding out customers, and it has no problem with fewer people signing up. In a conference call with analysts this week, CEO Chase Carey said the company has a new focus on "quality subscribers" (read: ones with money). It finds these subscribers by analyzing their income, age, home ownership, education and other metrics, Carey said in an earnings call with analysts. (Transcript here). DirecTV puts those customers into different categories to figure out who's valuable and...

Granted, the numbers are way bigger But, what sticks out are the ~400 busiest posters.. Let's have a look at the Top 15: kathyinalaska : 30,156 (83 p.d.) luvw : 25,212 (69 p.d.) nwarizonagranny : 25,126 (69 p.d.) pissant : 23,461 (64 p.d.) mylife : 23,038 (63 p.d.) chicagoconservative2: 20,998 (57 p.d.) cindy : 17,721 (49 p.d.) salvation : 17,653 (48 p.d) sunkenciv : 17,519 (48 p.d.) sandrat : 17,374 (47 p.d.) fuddfan : 17,147 (47 p.d.) clintnsuhks :17,118 (45 p.d.) stephenjohnbanker: 16,233 (44 p.d.) calpernia : 16,073 (44 p.d.) eternalvigilance : 15,319 (42 p.d.) That takes some persistence!

The US and UK governments are developing increasingly sophisticated gadgets to keep individuals under their surveillance. When it comes to technology, the US is determined to stay ahead of the game.... Their goal is to invent a system whereby a facial image can be matched to your gait, your height, your weight and other elements, so a computer will be able to identify instantly who you are. How you walk could be used to identify you in a crowd. "As you walk through a crowd, we'll be able to track you," said Professor Challapa. "These are all things that don't...

From late 2004 until mid-2006, a little-known data-mining computer system developed by the US Department of Homeland Security to hunt terrorists, weapons of mass destruction, and biological weapons sifted through Americans' personal data with little regard for federal privacy laws. Now the $42 million cutting-edge system, designed to process trillions of pieces of data, has been halted and could be canceled pending data-privacy reviews, according to a newly released report to Congress by the DHS's own internal watchdog

WASHINGTON - The FBI is gathering and sorting information about Americans to help search for potential terrorists, insurance cheats and crooked pharmacists, according to a government report obtained Tuesday. Records about identity thefts, real estate transactions, motor vehicle accidents and complaints about Internet drug companies are being searched for common threads to aid law enforcement officials, the Justice Department said in a report to Congress on the agency's data-mining practices. In addition, the report disclosed government plans to build a new database to assess the risk posed by people identified as potential or suspected terrorists. The chairman of the Senate...

In late 2002, Alex Gage sold his share of a well-established polling firm and set about convincing Karl Rove that he had the answer to ensuring President Bush's reelection. His pitch was simple: Take corporate America's love affair with learning everything it can about its customers, and its obsession with carving up the country into smaller and smaller clusters of like-minded consumers, and turn those trends into a political strategy. The Bush majority would be made up of thousands of groups of like-minded voters whom the campaign could reach with precisely the right message on the issues they considered most...

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...