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The Value of Commercial Database in Fighting Terrorism
Posted March 1, 2005 – 3:07 pm by Yakov Shafranovich in PoliticsThere has been quite some talk on the ‘Net and in the media about whether giving permission to the government for the use of commercial database services will help with fighting terrorism. I recently ordered a report from one of these companies, Axciom and frankly the results that I got back very pretty bleak.
I send in a card with three four telephone numbers (home, cell and fax), my full name and two addresses (school and home). There was also a $5 fee. I got back four reports: one Telephone Product Search, one Identity Product Search and two Property Product Searches.
Starting with the the Telephone product search, for my school address and name the resulting phone number was someone else’s. For my home address and name the resulting phone number was in fact correct. For reverse phone number searches for all three numbers no results were found while my own searches online were able to yield at least one number.
For the Idenfity search the reported data was four years old without my driver license, incorrect month of birth and no gender. The property searches got nothing.
While on one hand I am appalled by the low quality of information present on the other hand I am kind of happy that most of my information has been kept out of their hands. But then again, with information like this how do you expect to fight terrorism?
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