FBI reveals its data-mining practices

Agency probing information about Americans to find terrorists, identity thieves, scam artists

By Lara Jakes Jordan

The FBI is gathering and sorting information about Americans to help search for potential terrorists, insurance cheats and crooked pharmacists, according to a government report obtained Tuesday.

Records about identity thefts, real estate transactions, motor vehicle accidents and complaints about Internet drug companies are being searched for common threads to aid law enforcement officials, the Justice Department said in a report to Congress on the agency’s data-mining practices.

In addition, the report disclosed government plans to build a new database to assess the risk posed by people identified as potential or suspected terrorists.

The report, sent to Congress this week, was required by lawmakers when they renewed the USA Patriot Act in 2005.

All but one of the databases — the one to track terrorists — have been up and running for several years, the report showed. The lone exception is the System to Assess Risk, or STAR, program to rate the threat posed by people already identified as suspected terrorists or named on terrorism watch lists.

The five other databases detailed in the report include:
• An identity theft intelligence program, used to identify major identity theft rings in a given geographic area.
• A health-care fraud system that looks at billing records in government and private insurance claims databases to identify fraud or overbilling by health-care providers.
• A database that looks at consumer complaints to the Food and Drug Administration to identify larger trends about fraud by Internet pharmacies.
• A housing fraud program that analyzes public data on real estate transactions to identify fraudulent housing purchases.
• A system that compares National Insurance Crime Bureau information against other data to crack down on fake car accident insurance claims and identify major offenders.

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