Tom Owad over at Applefritter has a nice simple example of the kind of homebrew data aggregation that’s possible with just a little bit of programming knowledge and a home internet connection.

The thing that scares me about data mining is not that super-secret information about me is revealed — my Amazon wish-list doesn’t contain anything I’d be embarrassed or concerned if it was seen by any of my friends or for that matter 99% of the other people in the world. And odds are good that anyone bothering to look me up by name or go to my website will fall into that category. The trouble is that if I pop up in a trolling-expedition at all it’s much more likely the troller is among that 1% of the people that I would be upset about reading my wish-list. Ed McMahon doesn’t mine the Internet to pick winners of the Publishers Sweepstakes, but over-zealous FBI agents do look for people promoting the wrong politics, companies look for suckers to blast with seemingly perfect-for-you product announcements, con artists look for rich recently-widowed women above a certain age, and pedophiles look for young latch-key kids with their own webcams.

From Bruce Schneier’s Cryptogram, in a recent post comparing Bush’s recent (and continuing!) wiretapping to Project Shamrock in the 1960s:

Bush’s eavesdropping program was explicitly anticipated in 1978, and made illegal by FISA. There might not have been fax machines, or e-mail, or the Internet, but the NSA did the exact same thing with telegrams.

We can decide as a society that we need to revisit FISA. We can debate the relative merits of police-state surveillance tactics and counterterrorism. We can discuss the prohibitions against spying on American citizens without a warrant, crossing over that abyss that Church warned us about twenty years ago. But the president can’t simply decide that the law doesn’t apply to him.

This issue is not about terrorism. It’s not about intelligence gathering. It’s about the executive branch of the United States ignoring a law, passed by the legislative branch and signed by President Jimmy Carter: a law that directs the judicial branch to monitor eavesdropping on Americans in national security investigations.

It’s not the spying, it’s the illegality.

Personally, I think it’s the illegality and the spying, but in the name of keeping the debate clear I’m happy to keep the two arguments separate.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Jane, from Coogee, was surprised to find three police on her bus asking to inspect mobile phones. Each took a phone at random and scrolled through messages for five or ten minutes. Everyone obeyed. “The people were perfectly friendly about it,” she said. “I thought it was a bit weird and a breach of privacy. But I didn’t say anything. Nobody did.”

No, it’s not about terrorism, it’s about potential racial violence, but it’s still that nasty abuse-of-rights-in-the-name-of-safety-from-unknown-boogeymen vibe. Of course, such flagrant violations of our rights without a court order could never happen in the US. In the US, we’d never even know they’d read our text messages without a court order until we read about it in the New York Times.

(Thanks to Omri for the link.)