Federal agencies are able to get consumer information, such as buying habits and financial records, that would be difficult for the government to gather but has become a booming business for private companies, according to this WashingtonPost.com article.
More money has been spent in buying this personal data from the private sector, along with the software to make sense of it all, since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The article goes on to state that:
Privacy advocates say the practice exposes ordinary people to ever more scrutiny by authorities while skirting legal protections designed to limit the government's collection and use of personal data.
Critics acknowledge that such data can be vital to law enforcement or intelligence investigations of specific targets but question the usefulness of "data-mining" software that combs huge amounts of information in the hopes of finding links and patterns that might pick someone out as suspicious.
Read the whole article here.
Know More about data mining at BestBizWare.com.
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