Show us your money: the USA PATRIOT Act lets the feds spy on your finances. But does it help catch terrorists?

Reason, Nov, 2003 by John Berlau

Even data mining experts say the most advanced technology is useless without human intelligence. "The data won't do anything unless you ask the right questions," says Marc Epstein, CEO of Data Mining International, a Los Gatos, California, firm that makes software for the U.S. Customs service and other law enforcement agencies. Epstein says that before the government starts collecting massive data for a TIA-style program, it should make better use of the data it has. He says there is much that can be gleaned simply from the customs data of goods going into and out of the country. "From a pure law enforcement point of view, putting aside privacy concerns, more information is better," Epstein says. "But we're not using the information that we have well."

30 Years of Failure

There are plenty in the tech world who would take issue with Epstein's assertion that more information is always better. Software engineer Bruce Schneier, for example, has written about the inevitable problem of "false positives" in a large database. Passengers at airports are already seeing the effect of false positives that mistakenly put them on "no fly" lists, presumably because their names are similar to those of terrorists or criminals. Recent press reports have chronicled the travails of several men named David Nelson, including the actor who played himself on the popular' 50s TV show 'The Adventure of Ozzie and Harriet, who have been delayed or prevented from catching their flights because the name mysteriously set off an alarm in an airport computer.

"When you are scanning a population that is composed of hundreds of millions of people, and the class of criminal you're looking for is a couple hundred or a couple thousand, there are no tools available, and there are almost certainly never going to be tools available, with the sophistication to focus almost exclusively on the bad guys," says Bob Gellman, who in the '90s acted as chief counsel of a House subcommittee on privacy and technology. Gellman says data mining's success in the private sector will never translate to law enforcement because a different level of precision is required. "If direct marketing companies, with all the research they do, get a 3 percent response rate, they're ecstatic," Gellman says. "And these are smart people with lots of data and lots of motivation because they're making money, and they can't do much better than that"

In the debate over the PATRIOT Act and other broad surveillance measures, the Bank Secrecy Act should be thought of as a 30-year experiment in subverting the Fourth Amendment. The experiment has imposed tremendous costs on individual privacy and the economy (even before 9/11, the banking industry was estimating compliance costs of $10 billion a year), with few tangible results in stopping crime and even fewer in preventing terrorism. Getting back to the standards of the Fourth Amendment is a good idea, not just for securing privacy but for making law enforcement and intelligence agencies more focused and effective at stopping criminals and catching terrorists.