The Federal Bureau of Investigations is developing a computer-profiling system that would enable investigators to target possible terror suspects, according to a Justice Department report submitted to Congress yesterday [to the Senate Judiciary Committee].
The System to Assess Risk, or STAR, assigns risk scores to possible suspects based on a variety of information, similar to the way a credit bureau assigns a rating based on a consumer's spending behavior and debt. The program focuses on foreign suspects but also includes data about some U.S. residents. A prototype is expected to be tested this year.
Justice Department officials said the system offers analysts a powerful new tool for finding possible terrorists. They said it is an effort to automate what analysts have been doing manually. ...
STAR is being developed by the FBI's Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force, which tracks suspected terrorists inside the country or as they enter. ...
After STAR has received the names of persons of interest, it runs them through an FBI "data mart" that includes classified and unclassified information from the government, airlines and commercial data brokers such as ChoicePoint. Then it runs them through the terrorist screening center database, which contains hundreds of thousands of names, as well as through a database containing information on non-citizens who enter the country. It also runs the names against information provided by data broker Accurint, which tracks addresses, phone numbers and driver's licenses.
The report said access to STAR would be limited to trained users and that data would be obtained lawfully. Results would be kept within the FBI's terrorist task force, the report said.
3 comments:
Reading this, I couldn't help but constantly think about the zillions of records in laptops that have been stolen across the US in the past few years. Madsen has a whole webpage devoted to a tally of news reports of them.
Madsen. I wanna believe in Madsen. Durst I?
I keep reading things in the news that I first read about a year or two ago in Madsen. He certainly is, hmm, hyperbolic, but, like Chertoff, I have gut feelings, and sometimes they're not gas, and I have a gut feeling Madsen in mostly on the level.
Or maybe it's gas.
On the whole, I think his site has more nuggets than hallucinations -- nuggets like his digging into rendition flights around the world.
But now he's gone to a subscription model, and I'm too cheap to follow, so I guess my Madsen days are over.
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