Page 93 - Privacy in a Cyber Age Policy and Practice

80 PRIVACY IN A CYBER AGE

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miners is unknown, because many of the contracts are classified.
However, one 2006 government study found that at least fifty-two federal
agencies had launched—or were planning to launch at the time of the
study—at least 199 data-mining projects that relied on the services and
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technology of commercial data banks. The lists are “typically sold at a few
cents per name” to other corporations, and there are roughly four thousand
of these privacy merchants. 37
What does a government dossier based on commercially compiled
data contain? According to Julia Angwin’s Dragnet Nation, her request for
information about herself held by U.S. Customs and Border Protection led
to a file that contained “thirty-one pages of detailed international travel
reservation information from a database called PNR, which stands for
Passenger Name Records. PNRs didn’t used to be in government hands.
They are commercial records held by airlines. But after the 9/11 attacks,
[legislation was passed that] soon became codified as requiring the airlines
to give the agency electronic access to the entire airline reservation data-
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bases.” A more complete list of information about Ms. Angwin held by
the government, according to her investigations, included “every address
[she] had lived at dating back to college . . . every phone number [she] had
ever used . . . the names of nearly all [her] relatives (as well as in-laws) . . . [a]
list of nearly three thousand people with whom [she] exchanged e-mail
in the past seven years . . . records of about twenty-six thousand Web
searches . . . [a] glimpse of [her] shopping habits . . . [and her] internal
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communications with [her] employer, the Wall Street Journal.” She states
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that this information mostly “was held by commercial data brokers,”
which is how the government gained access to the information.
An overarching 2004 report from the Government Accountability
Office on data mining by the federal government in the early 2000s found
that 52 different federal agencies used or planned to use some form of data
mining, which included 199 planned or operational data mining programs.
Of these, 54 programs involved “efforts to mine data from the private sector.”
(Meanwhile, 77 involved “efforts to mine data from other federal agencies . . .
[including] student loan application data, bank account numbers, credit
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card information, and taxpayer identification numbers.” ) Moreover, the
trend is to extend this use, as evidenced by a 2011 FBI manual that enabled
agents to search for private citizens in commercial databases without prior
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authorization or even notification. In 2011, Google revealed that the U.S.
government made the most requests for Internet users’ private data in
2010, and Google complied with 94 percent of these orders. 43
One may well hold that some government usages of private data banks
serve legitimate purposes, even if the databases are loaded with extensive
dossiers on most adult Americans instead of only those for which there is