I was innocently minding my own business, reading some geeky magazine, when I came across a headline that made me pause: General Accounting Office reports rampant federal data mining. The article talks about how the Pentagon's "Terrorist Information Awareness" program was cancelled, but that there are still oodles of different Federal agencies putting "two and two together" and figuring out all sorts of things about us.

This bothers me to no end, and if you were reading about "nearly 200 data mining initiatives that collect and analyze personal information of U.S. citizens are in operation..." you'd be concerned too.

It gets worse too. Hawaiian senator Daniel Akaka shares that he's "concerned by the number of federal data mining activities that use private-sector data. We do not know the quality and accuracy of the information, whether individuals have access to the information to correct inaccuracies, and whether individuals gave consent." Well, Senator Akaka, I am pretty darn sure that no-one's given consent to the federal government scraping credit reports and other private sector data that they can merge into their federal data (think IRS, think FBI, think Social Security Administration). Have you?

A good first step in this regard is to read up on the privacy and identity theft areas here on Real Life Debt.

Oh, and hope that the people in office don't lose sight of our fundamental freedom and right to privacy in the fear of terrorist activities in this dangerous world.