In Every Voter, A 'Microtarget'

X's recent post on data mining makes me think, and I'm going to be a bit contrarian if I may. Bear with me as I digress a bit.

Don’t worry you’re covered. The Minority Report is here.
Seriously. I’d love to see old George Stephanopoulos (his name is in the spell check) ask a candidate – what is your position on the great grandson of CARNIVORE determining who gets rounded up? First carnivore, then TIA, now Tangram – the Air Force’s new strategic data mining program.

Thus a BusinessWeek reader quipped at the comments box for this little zinger. Let your imagination soar past phone calls:

The Departments of Justice, State, and Homeland Security spend millions annually to buy commercial databases that track Americans' finances, phone numbers, and biographical information, according to a report last month by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. Often, the agencies and their contractors don't ensure the data's accuracy, the GAO found.

Buying commercially collected data allows the government to dodge certain privacy rules. The Privacy Act of 1974 restricts how federal agencies may use such information and requires disclosure of what the government is doing with it. But the law applies only when the government is doing the data collecting.

"Grabbing data wholesale from the private sector is the way agencies are getting around the requirements of the Privacy Act and the Fourth Amendment," says Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington and a member of the Homeland Security Dept.'s Data Privacy & Integrity Advisory Committee.