Congress, Catch Up

Anne Laurent, former executive editor at Government Executive magazine, writes in her blog, The Agile Mind, about the recent unclassified report released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence on report unveiling the Reynard project, conducted by the ODNI's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity to spy on players in virtual worlds to see if they can, as Laurent quotes, "identify the emerging social, behavioral and cultural norms in virtual worlds and gaming environments" and then "apply the lessons learned to determine the feasibility of automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world." Her post highlights just how quickly technology is moving as compared with Congress' ability to understand it. Her point:

DNI archly informs lawmakers that they won't be getting much real information about intelligence community data mining because they asked for the wrong thing. The law [the 2007 Data Mining Reporting Act] defines data mining as "a program involving pattern-based queries, searches or other analyses of 1 or more electronic databases" to "discover or locate a predictive pattern or anomoly indicative of terrorist activities." But that's not the kind of data mining DNI uses most, the report says.

"Analysis performed within the ODNI and its constituent elements for counterterrorism and similar purposes is often performed using various types of link analysis tools [which] start with a known or suspected terrorist or other subject of foreign intelligence interest and use various methods to uncover links between that known subject and potential associates or other persons with whom that subject is or has been in contact," the report says. But "the Data Mining Reporting Act does not include such analyses within its definition of 'data mining' because such analyses are not 'pattern-based." Note to Congress: Catch up. Fix your definitions.