Data Mining and Privacy - Why I'm not as worried as some people are

In the last few days, I’ve come across these articles:

From the New York Times, http://tinyurl.com/yk89zs

Military Expands Intelligence Role in U.S.

”Jan. 13, 2007. The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering.”

And from the Patriot Daily News, http://tinyurl.com/tl4m8

Bush Quietly "Repeals" Major Privacy Law

“Jan 11, 2007. Bush is fed up with hearing how his actions and policies violate our privacy rights. True to Bush’s Orwellian worldview, his answer is to create a privacy board to ostensibly protect our rights. In reality, it is Mr. Decider who controls the privacy board so that his interpretation of laws will determine how and if our rights are actually protected by more than shallow words. It is the implementation of these interpretations which will chip away through the backdoor or repeal/amend our privacy rights under federal law. The chipping has already started.”

Of course, the steady erosion of our rights to privacy does concern me. However, my older son, Jeff, who is a technologist involved in national security, is concerned about our Fourth Amendment rights to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures. He’s posted numerous articles about the confluence of data mining and privacy issues on his blog, http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/privacy

I have a lot of faith in him!