The fear of terrorist attacks has grown immensely since 9/11. America is attempting many tactics to prevent an attack like that from ever happening again. Unfortunately, many of these tactics are causing invasion of privacy into the lives of Americans. Working to stop terrorism is going to impact the everyday lives of our citizens. Furthermore, that is why it is becoming such a big issue. Many people do not want change the way they go about their everyday lives. A recent way the government has tried to prevent terrorism is by data mining the people in our country. In the article "How Do Violations of Privacy and Moral Autonomy Threaten the Basis of Our Democracy?" authors Laas-Mikko and Sutrop define data mining as "behavior detection technologies that monitor and manage malintents and abnormal behavior from a distance in order to prevent terrorism and criminal attacks". This new technology lets you sort through vast amounts of data to analyze and find patterns or correlations. It is a way of taking databases and turning it into useful information. The government is starting to use this to find suspicious patterns by analyzing phone call logs, credit card transactions, websites being visited and many more. There has been tons of controversy on this new tactic. So the question many ask today is: will data mining really put a stop to terrorism? Data mining will not be enough to prevent terrorism in the U.S.
In fact the government has already started to use a program that uses data mining to prevent attacks. This program is the Information Awareness Program (IAP). It was created in January 2011 and is funded by the Congress. According to Nikki Swartz, the author of "U.S Government Still Data Mining," an article from Information Management Journal, Congress had defunded this program which had a budget of $54 million dollars. They had to defund this program because it was raising privacy concerns and Congress was not watching over it or making sure they did not do anything that would be against privacy issues (Swartz).