Most Americans who are aware of the federal government's post-9/11 overprotective habits will remember the Patriot Act. However, the FBI's new data-mining techniques have brought a new level of privacy invasion to counterterrorism. Newly obtained records indicate that the FBI has not merely looked into the phone data of Americans suspected of communicating with extremists, but also into those of their "community of interest"-all individuals in contact with the FBI's target. By mining the phone data of this so-called community, the FBI now possesses thousands of pages of information on people who have only tenuous links to individuals under suspicion. Such data may include the persons to whom the targets have spoken, when and where the conversations took place, and other facts requested by the government.
The data obtained from targeting this community of interest is the crux of the data-mining technique known as "link analysis," a favorite among intelligence officials in the FBI, National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency. Link analysis employs communication patterns to identify suspects who may have no other traceable relation to a terrorist organization.
Earlier in March, the FBI petitioned the Federal Communications Commission for the right to gain access to high-speed Internet connections to tap the voice patterns of terrorists online. By taking it a step further and analyzing the phone call patterns of potentially innocent people, the Bureau's proposals have indeed become problematic.
This lack of balance between security and privacy has already been opposed by the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil libertarian groups. Their reasoning is that the possibility of finding a terrorist connection between a suspect and a member of a community of interest is tenuous at best, since the usefulness of domestic eavesdropping naturally decreases as the links are taken further. It's almost certain that the FBI has tapped phone conversations of people completely unrelated to terrorist activities. A hapless individual may suddenly become the target of a terrorist investigation-such possibilities must not be taken lightly.
Furthermore, the Bureau's method of obtaining such information is cast with the pall of bad ethics. A nonprofit advocacy group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, received over 2,500 pages of mined data from the FBI through a Freedom of Information lawsuit brought against the government in 2005. These pages contain requests made to telephone companies, for particular phone numbers under suspicion. Most telephone companies will not refuse these requests, since compliance is helpful for marketing and detecting fraud.
For police work, the FBI's unprecedented program is too theoretical. A U.S. citizen who is not even the subject of criminal probing will essentially have certain aspects of his life under close scrutiny. Targeting the threats to this country and bringing terrorists to justice are indeed key priorities. The importance of security cannot be emphasized enough. However, sacrificing our constitutionally decreed liberties on the altar of homeland protection should not be allowed by our courts and legislatures. We must strike a balance, and community of interest investigations disrupt that balance. They trample the constitutional rights and the safety of blameless individuals. There is no justification for the FBI to demand phone records in the future.