# Army Okays Computer Spying

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2004-08-25T17:05:35Z


Donna Wentworth @ EFF Deep LinksArmy Okays Computer Spying

JetBlue ignited a huge privacy scandal when the news broke that the airline secretly provided more than 5 million passenger records to Torch Concepts, a military contractor.  Yet the Army Inspector General Agency concluded [PDF] that JetBlue did not violate the Privacy Act.  The reason: Torch never looked up individuals by name, but instead used a computer to dig through and analyze their private information. This is quite disturbing. I guess this means that taking massive amounts of data and crunching through them to create "profiles" is OK. I wonder how small the clusters can be? Can they, for instance, profile companies, race, occupation, address or other kind of groupings for profiling?

There was a case in Japan where the Japanese government kept a list of Freedom of Information Act requesters in a list on a network with their backgrounds and this was found to be "legal".

I don't know enough about the JetBlue case to make a judgment on just how bad I think it is, but it seems to be part of a larger trend pushing the limits of the law.





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Privacy, US Policy and Politics