Data on Americans mined for terror risk – U.S. Security – MSNBC.com

If you remember DARPA’s Total Information Awareness program, the FBI’s “STAR” program (System to Assess Risk) should look familiar. An article in the August 2004 edition of Federal Computing Week has some details on the short lived TIA program and what brought about its demise in case you don’t remember. The STAR program looks like TIA with a new name and it should be shutdown for the very same reasons. Some of the reasons are spelled out in the MSNBC story linked above. Even if the information came only from government or just law enforcement sources, quality would still be an issue. When you put commercial databases, which are rife with bad data into the mix, as the old saying goes: garbage in, garbage out.