Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) releases annual report on Data Mining

Missoula, March 6 (Al-Masakin)–The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released an 8 page report on ‘Data Mining’ today.  The report issued in pursuant to the Data Mining Reporting Act covers data mining activities by the Federal Government between Jan. 31, 2008 and Jan. 31, 2009.  The report covers data mining activties carried out only by the ODNI, other constituents of the Intelligence Community (IC) report their own data mining acrivities to Congress through their own departments or agencies.

 

Data mining is a program involving pattern-based queries, searches or other analyses of 1 or more electronic data bases in order to discover or locate a predictive pattern or anomaly indicative of terrorist or criminal activity.

 

Aside from ‘pattern-based’ tools, the ODNI also used ‘link based’ tools.  Link based tools target specific individuals and their associates.  Link based tools start with known or suspected terrorists or other subjects of foreign intelligence interest, their potential associates, or other persons with whom that subject is or has been in contact.

 

The Data Mining Reporting Act does not require the ODNI to report link based searches, because those queries are not ‘pattern-based.’  Those searches rather use “personal identifiers of a specific individual, or inputs associated with a specific individual, or inputs associated with a specific individual or group of individuals,” the report said.  The ODNI does not engage in pattern-based searches or queries.

 

The ODNI does however engage in one research program within the Office of Incisive Analysis that is exploring techniques for identifying patterns that may be associated with terrorist activity called the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA).  According to the report the IARPA’s mission is to “invest in high-risk/high payoff research programs that have the potential to provide the U.S. with an overwhelming intelligence advantage over its future adversaries.”  IARPA is still in its experimental stages, does not deploy its technologies in the field, and is not expected to be fully operational for a number of years.

 

The ODNI is however operating another program, through it does focus on data mining per se, that does meet the criteria for reporting under the Data Mining Reporting Act called Video Analysis and Content Extraction (VACE).  The VACE program is a program designed to automate the process of reviewing video content.  “VACE involves subject-based queries of video data bases.” 

 

The video data used by the VACE program consists of data collected from public places outside the United States and from information from public media sources. 

 

The report of the ODNI its data mining related activities is unclassified and may be obtained from the ODNI’s website.

 

EHC / EHC

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