Clinton Sets Up Group To Datamine For Illegal Internet Activity
President Clinton this week set up a working group that will be made up of federal managers to study unlawful conduct on the Internet.
Clinton issued an executive order calling for agencies to set up the working group, which will be responsible for issuing a report and offering recommendations on how to use existing laws and technology to aid in the detection, investigation and prosecution of criminal acts conducted over the Internet.
As an example, the executive order refers to the illegal sale of guns, explosives, controlled substances, fraud and the issuance of child pornography over the Internet.
Daniel Boyle, SAS Institute's director for the Department of Defense and intelligence, says the working group likely will consider ways of using data mining to deal with online criminal activity. SAS, in Cary, N.C., is a major supplier of custom software to the federal government.
With the tidal wave of data coursing through the Internet every day, it would be impossible to successfully wade through it and pinpoint criminal activity just through pointing and clicking, Boyle says.
Data mining software tools that sift through data in search of anomalies or patterns - "things that don't look quite right" - should be used, Boyle says.
Ari Schwartz, a policy analyst at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C., cautioned that working group members need to keep privacy concerns in mind when they drafts their report, which is due in December.
"This discussion could lead to a whole new set of monitoring tools," he says. "We hope this doesn't change the way people surf the 'Net. We don't want to have people think government is monitoring their lives."
The government already is considering a plan to monitor many non-Defense Department computers for signs of intrusion. In its quest to protect government computers from outside attacks, the proposed Federal Intrusion Detection Network unnecessarily sacrifices privacy, the Center for Democracy and Technology has said.