

There was a time, early in the war on terror, when agencies like the FBI could have told Congressional investigators to go to hell, without paying much of a price. Not any more. Earlier today, a House appropriators voted to pull $11 million to expand a controversial FBI data-mining project, after the Bureau repeatedly stiff-armed Congressmen and their gumshoes in the Government Accountability Office.

“By refusing to answer even the most basic questions about this program, the Department of Justice has given us little choice. In fact, we’re only doing what they told us to do,” said Congressman Brad Miller in a statement.

“The Department of Justice... said that if Congress didn’t like what they were doing, we could pull their funding. Well, that’s what we’ve done... Until an agency can provide reasonable explanations, and assurances that our citizens’

privacy won’t be violated, it would be irresponsible to give the

Department of Justice this large increase in funds. ”

The project, known as the National Security Analysis Center (NSAC), is supposed to bring together "hundreds of millions of electronic records created or collected by the FBI and other government agencies," ABC News notes. The idea is to use that "vast ocean of data to 'predict' who might be a potential terrorist, in the absence of intelligence linking the man or woman to any radical or extremist group."

But security and tech experts have long questioned whether this kind of predictive data-mining is really feasible. And the FBI has a rich history of royally screwing up big technology projects. So Reps. Miller, James Sensenbrenner, and John Tierney asked the Government Accountability Office to check in on NSAC.

"It took repeated attempts by GAO even to obtain an initial meeting with Justice Department officials on the issue," Miller wrote in a letter to House Appropriations Committee chairman David Obey. When they did meet...

Justice Department officials bluntly told GAO

that they would provide no information and GAO had no right to see any records... regarding the purpose and scope of NSAC and what data they planned to obtain. The Justice Department said the requested information dealt with intelligence data and a 'national security system' which... was 'exempt' from GAO's jurisdiction.

In a later meeting, the letter adds, the FBI changed its tune. The

G-Men claimed they had "no written plans" that "would provide any meaningful details," because the center was not yet "operational." Nevertheless,

Justice Department budget documents asked for millions of dollars to

"continue the development of initial operating capabilities of the

NSAC."

The new center is "being built on the backbone of an FBI

task force whose original mission" was to investigate "aliens suspected of having ties to terrorist organizations," Miller's office noted.

*But the mission of NSAC has expanded far beyond that limited purpose and scope and the Justice Department claims that with this new data mining center’s access to billions of personnel records the “universe of subjects will expand exponentially.”

The potential for abuse and the possibility that innocent American citizens will become wrongfully ensnared within the FBI’s growing web of potential suspects is a grave concern. *

And vague claims about national security don't automatically wash away concerns about creepily-invasive government projects any more.

[Illo: Slate]