The FBI's department of precrime

New American, The, August 6, 2007

In the short story Minority Report, the late science fiction master Philip K. Dick described a future police division called "Precrime" that sought to discover and arrest criminals before they committed an actual crime. Dick's Precrime unit depended on the work of three human "precogs" who could see the future, but also used banks of computers and databases to refine the precog vision of the future. In the unit's "analytical wing," Dick imagined "impressive banks of equipment--the data-receptors, and the computing mechanisms that studied and restructured the incoming material."

Post-9/11, real life has begun to imitate Philip K. Dick. Absent the "precogs," a new report to Congress has painted a picture of a sort of nascent FBI precrime unit using data-mining programs to filter through databases of private information looking for suspicious activity. According to Wired magazine, the Justice Department is using data mining to track "identity-theft gangs, Medicare fraud, staged automobile accidents, online pharmacy scams and illegal housing sales."

The Justice Department is also using a System to Assess Risk (STAR) data-mining program that will let a user enter the names of terrorist suspects into a computer and calculate, based on 35 factors, how likely each person is to be a terrorist threat. According to Wired, STAR makes use of "a massive database of public records ranging from fishing licenses to bankruptcy proceedings. That system is owned by LexisNexis."

The STAR system is still under development, but when it comes online, some worry that it will cast a wide net that will catch innocent people as well as criminals. That's something that has plagued federal security programs like the embattled terrorist watch list maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC). The ballooning number of names on that list now includes hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent Americans. One of them is columnist John L. Smith of the Las Vegas Review Journal. In one column, Smith described how TSA agents repeatedly stopped him, his wife, and his nine-year-old daughter at airport security checkpoints. Smith finally found out the reason for the frequent stops. "'Your name is on the watch list,' the friendly Southwest representative explained," Smith recalled. "It's the name, she said. It's a common name, a possible alias."