The FBI’s data mining tool that was considered the marvel for investigation purposes is now being used in hacker and domestic criminal investigations, and contains tens of thousands of records from private corporate databases, including car-rental companies, large hotel chains and at least one national department store.
Whats FBI’s move?
FBI’s National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC) is logged with more than 1.5 billion government and private-sector records about citizens and foreigners. This step is considered as the important milestone of the government and it is now a step closer than ever to implementing the “Total Information Awareness” system – a dream project of Pentagon.
Once this system is up and running, the government will be able to track and execute before devastation.
Wired.com’s analysis of more than 800 pages of documents obtained under Freedom of Information Act request show the FBI has been continuously expanding the NSAC system and its goals since 2004. By 2008, NSAC comprised 103 full-time employees and contractors, and the FBI was seeking budget approval for another 71 employees, plus more than $8 million for outside contractors to help analyze its growing pool of private and public data.
How did NSAC come to existence?
The NSAC came as two separate systems designed to improve information-sharing between government agencies following the Sept. 11 attacks. The Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force database has been used to screen flight-school candidates and assist anti-terror investigations. The Investigative Data Warehouse is the more general system, and is the principal element now under expansion.
“The IDW objective was to create a data warehouse that uses certain data elements to provide a single-access repository for information related to issues beyond counterterrorism to include counterintelligence, criminal and cyber investigations,” stated a formerly secret fiscal year 2008 budget request document. “These missions will be refined and expanded as these capabilities are folded into the NSAC.”
How useful has it proved to be?
The FBI used the system to locate a suspected Al Qaeda operative with expertise in biological agents who was hiding out in Houston. And when law enforcement officials got information suggesting members of a Pakistani terrorist group had obtained jobs as Philadelphia taxi drivers, the NSAC was tapped to help the city’s police force run background checks on Philadelphia cabbies.
Read more here:
- Data-Mining for Terrorists Not ‘Feasible,’ DHS-Funded Study Finds
- Inside DCSNet, the FBI’s Nationwide Eavesdropping Network
- Documents: FBI Spyware Has Been Snaring Extortionists, Hackers for Years
- FBI’s Secret Spyware Tracks Down Teen Who Made Bomb Threats
- Funding for TIA All But Dead
- Report: NSA’s Warrantless Spying Resurrects Banned ‘Total Information Awareness’
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