• Acxiom Internet Scanning System

    From Steve Asher@3:800/432 to All on Sun Feb 12 01:59:35 2006
    From the current issue of EPIC Alert, re Acxiom's proposed system
    to scan the internet & identify "extremist" websites. While it is
    not clear if the proposal was ever funded, the PDF file below
    gives a list of possible "Marker Words and Phrases" that might
    cause a web site to be seen as suspicious.

    ( http://epic.org/privacy/choicepoint/acxiominternet.pdf )

    --------------------------------------------------------------------

    E P I C A l e r t
    Volume 13.03 February 10, 2006 http://www.epic.org/alert/EPIC_Alert_13.03.html

    [...]

    ======================================================================
    News in Brief ======================================================================

    [...]

    Acxiom Proposed Massive Internet-Scanning System

    Documents obtained by EPIC from the Department of Justice under the
    Freedom of Information Act show that commercial data broker Acxiom
    proposed a system to automatically scan the Internet and identify
    websites "belonging to advocates of extremist views and actions..." The
    plan proposed to extract personal information from websites and use it
    "to establish possible connections between extremist groups" and to
    collect data for an "Identity Verification System to be used by
    airlines, rental car agencies, and other business and government
    agencies." Prior releases of FOIA documents showed that Acxiom was
    considered as a source of data for the Total Information Awareness
    program. The $1,000,000 proposal was submitted to the Justice Department through Representative Vic Snyder (D-AR) on behalf of Acxiom and
    University of Arkansas's Department of Computer Science. It is unclear
    whether the proposal was ever funded.

    Acxiom FOIA Documents (pdf):

    http://epic.org/privacy/choicepoint/acxiominternet.pdf

    EPIC Commercial Data Broker Page:

    http://www.epic.org/privacy/choicepoint/

    [... ...]

    Cheers, Steve..

    ---
    * Origin: Xaragmata / Adelaide SA telnet://xaragmata.thebbs.org (3:800/432)