The Government is Searching Your Credit Card Records

The government is compiling your credit card, credit history and buy habits to scrutinize for suspicious patterns. Is anyone listening? I find this very disturbing. They are collecting every record there is of us.
WaPo

The Pentagon pays a private company to compile data on teenagers it can recruit to the military. The Homeland Security Department buys consumer information to help screen people at borders and detect immigration fraud. As federal agencies delve into the vast commercial market for consumer information, such as buying habits and financial records, they are tapping into data that would be difficult for the government to accumulate but that has become a booming business for private companies.


Industry executives, analysts and watchdog groups say the federal government has significantly increased what it spends to buy personal data from the private sector, along with the software to make sense of it, since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. They expect the sums to keep rising far into the future.


Privacy advocates say the practice exposes ordinary people to ever more scrutiny by authorities while skirting legal protections designed to limit the government's collection and use of personal data. Critics acknowledge that such data can be vital to law enforcement or intelligence investigations of specific targets but question the usefulness of "data-mining" software that combs huge amounts of information in the hopes of finding links and patterns that might pick someone out as suspicious.


[...]The system, originally called CAPPS II, sought to comb airline passenger records and verify information that fliers provided about themselves with information provided by companies that aggregate data about consumers. The problem, according to several officials who worked closely on the program but declined to speak publicly about it, was that the information about consumers was never proved to be effective in evaluating the risk posed by an airline passenger.


At first, officials sought to identify passengers who were not "deeply rooted" in a community and, for example, moved often and did not have an established credit history. But the system always ended up scoring too many people as "risky" who really posed little threat. "I am just not prepared to say that because someone can't get a mortgage, they are a terrorist threat to an airplane," said a former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the program. "These data aggregator products are used today in the financial world to identify certain things, and they're not designed to identify potential terrorist threats."