Coincidence? You be the judge. What’s clear is that, as is typical of Bush’s operations, the program was run without regard to the law. The Christian Science Monitor:

The $42 million cutting-edge [ADVISE] system, designed to process trillions of pieces of data, has been halted and could be canceled pending data-privacy reviews, according to a newly released report to Congress by the DHS’s own internal watchdog.

Data mining to help fight the war on terror has become an accepted, even mandated, method to provide timely security information. The DHS operates at least a dozen such programs; intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense employ many others.

But ADVISE (Analy­sis, Dissemina­tion, Visu­ali­zation, Insight and Semantic Enhance­ment) was special. An electronic omnivore conceived in 2003, it was designed to ingest information from scores of databases, blogs, e-mail traffic, intelligence reports, and other sources, government documents and researchers say.

How reassuring. (And it would certainly work for domestic politics, too, eh?)

So, what could go wrong?

Yet ADVISE, whose existence and scope were first detailed by the Monitor in February 2006, seems to have run afoul of its own ambitious scope. It failed to incorporate federal privacy laws into its system design. From its earliest days, the system’s pilot programs used “live data, including personally identifiable information, from multiple sources in attempts to identify potential terrorist activity,” but without taking steps required by federal law and DHS’s own internal guidelines to keep that data from being misused, the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) said in a June report to Congress, which was made public Aug. 13.

In February, the GAO recommended a full-blown data-privacy review of the ADVISE system. Without that, its report said, ADVISE holds “potential for erroneous association of individuals with crime or terrorism and the misidentification of individuals with similar names.”

And this was no pilot program. It was live:

From late 2004 to mid-2006, three ADVISE pilot programs – one focused on biological threats, another on weapons of mass destruction, and a third classified program to identify emerging threats – were not mere test beds working out technical bugs. Instead, they were “operational” and used “personally identifiable” data, without having conducted any privacy-risk assessments.

Now, the DHS privacy office reported to Congress that live data wasn’t used:

the privacy office mentions the ADVISE system only once, in a footnote, in its mandatory report last summer to Congress on data-mining activities. Until the “ADVISE tool” had data attached to it, it was not a data-mining program needing privacy review, the office reported.

Except the program managers went around DHS’s own privacy office, so DHS ended up lying to Congress:

Unknown to the privacy office, the ADVISE pilot programs had been operational and using personal data for about 18 months before the privacy office made that report to Congress, the OIG found.

I wonder who gave them signed off on that? Chertoff? Or would Chertoff have gone to Justice for a legal opinion?

NOTE Gee, I hope this information wasn’t shared with any other agencies. Of course, there won’t be any problem, because anybody falsely identified as a terrist will be able to challenge the record and correct it.

[Hysterical laughter. Smashing glass. Sobs.]