That’s the argument we get from the big government types and it’s meant to be a conversation-stopper: Isn’t safety against terrorism more important than anything else?

In the letter below, Jim Harper counters that argument.

LETTERS

Data-Mining, Civil Liberties and Preventing Terrorism

Regarding your editorial “Thank You for Data-Mining” (June 7): Data-mining works in the area of credit-card fraud because there are thousands of examples per year on which to model how credit-card fraud appears in data. Also, the costs of false positives are low—an untimely phone call or other inconvenience placed on credit-card holders, for example.

Terrorist planning, attempts and attacks are too rare to support the creation of valid predictive models. False positives in this area waste taxpayer dollars, needlessly infringe on privacy and civil liberties and misdirect the valuable time and energy of the men and women in the national-security community.

We learned last month that the IRS was targeting citizen groups based on their exercise of constitutional rights. Now we see that private information about every American’s phone calling is being warehoused for the use of unknown government officials in an uncertain future. It is not a good idea, and it is not justified by the potential for use of that information in data-mining for counterterrorism purposes.

Jim Harper

The Cato Institute