Tom Owad on Applefritter has
looked into Data
Mining 101: Finding Subversives with Amazon Wishlists. It's a pretty
impressive project: He shows how far information that is available
publicly and gratis can go in tying ideas to the people that harbour
them.
It used to be you had to get a warrant to monitor a person or a group of people. Today, it is
increasingly easy to monitor ideas. And then track them back to people. Most of us don't have
access to the databases, software, or computing power of the NSA, FBI, and other government
agencies. But an individual with access to the internet can still develop a fairly sophisticated
profile of hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens using free and publicly available resources.
Here's an example.
This is what's possible with publicly available information, but imagine if one had access to
Amazon's entire database - which still contains every sale dating back to 1999 by the way.
Under Section 251 of the Patriot Act, the FBI can require Amazon to turn over its records,
without probable cause, for an "authorized investigation . . . to protect against international
terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities." Amazon is forbidden to disclose that they have
turned over any records, so that you would never know that the government is keeping records
of your book purchases. And obviously it is quite simple to crossreference this info with data
available in other databases.
Whew. Scary.
via BoingBoing
