DHS Data Mining–It’s as Bad as You Thought

The Department of Homeland Security just sent a report to Congress about its data mining activities. This is the third such report as required under Section 806 of the Federal Agency Data Mining Reporting Act of 2007.

Under the Act, DHS was compelled to go back and report on its data mining activities in 2006 and a previous report for data mining activities in 2007.

It seem as though Congress did not like the previous reports and thought that DHS was using a definition of data mining that was too narrow which might have excluded too many DHS programs.

And guess what they found? Yep, a whole bunch of activities that DHS had not reported to Congress as being data mining turned out to be.....wait for it.....data mining! Who'da thunk it?

DHS promises to go back and do the privacy assessments and to be good little boys and girls in future, but basically, this is Congress catching them red handed.