Will New Approach to Counterterrorism Analysis Raise Privacy Concerns?

By Karla Robinson
March 26, 2012

After 18 months of development, the Obama administration is enacting new rules that reduce restrictions on counterterrorism efforts.
“The guidelines will lengthen to five years — from 180 days — the amount of time the center can retain private information about Americans when there is no suspicion that they are tied to terrorism, intelligence officials said. The guidelines are also expected to result in the center making more copies of entire databases and ‘data mining them’ using complex algorithms to search for patterns that could indicate a threat,” the New York Times reports.
Officials say the same information was available under the previous rules, but it was far more cumbersome for analysts. However, privacy advocates are unsure about the change, raising civil liberties concerns.
“There is a genuine operational need to try to get us into a position where we can make the maximum use of the information the government already has to protect people,” Robert S. Litt, the general counsel who oversees the National Counterterrorism Center, told the Times. “We have to manage to do that in a way that provides protection to people’s civil liberties and privacy. And I really think this has been a good-faith and reasonably successful effort to do that.”

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