14 DAY TRIAL // The technique that's so useful for the Department of Homeland Security in detecting terrorist threats might be putting personal information at risk due to the lack of executive review and transparency of data mining systems.
The U.S Government Accountability Office (GAO) was appointed to assess policies for evaluating the effectiveness and privacy protection of these systems, to estimate the agency's efforts in completing the task and to determine what are the impediments in accomplishing the goal.
After developing an evaluation framework based on recomandations coming from the National Research Council and industry practices, they compared it to the policies currently implemented by DHS and three of its component agencies.
The test that targeted six data mining systems from the DHS, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration, revealed that none of them had an effective policy in place for their supervision.
Homeland Security plans on improving their framework but until they do so, the counterterrorism measures cannot ensure a proper securing of personal privacy.
The report also showed that even though they already took some steps in obtaining an efficient securing of private data, none of the tested agencies “performed all of the key activities associated with an effective evaluation framework “
GAO recommends that the DHS executives immediately address the discrepancies found in their evaluation policies.
The Accountability office also advises the Chief Information Officer and Chief Procurement Officer of Homeland Security to better collaborate with their peers from component agencies in order to have a better chance at providing solutions for the challenges they face.
The information sharing component implemented by ICE called the Law Enforcement Information Sharing Service might be deactivated until a privacy impact assessments that includes this component is approved.
Finally, GAO recommends that some of the system program offices such as the one for Analytical Framework for Intelligence (AFI) or Automated Targeting System (ATS) address the deficiencies that prevent them from properly evaluating privacy protections and system effectiveness.