The Law of Unintended Consequences
I am often accused of being conspiratorial by radio interviewers or at least foolish because I do not automatically support the concept that national security and the needs of the government always trump personal privacy. The naysayers often go on to question the idea that anything monumentally bad will ever happen to innocent folks as a consequence of all that data being collected. To all of them, I offer this story:
In 1993, the government was worried about student loan scofflaws and decided to crack down. They did this by building a massive federal database called the National Student Loan Data System and stuffing it to the gills with tasty bits of bytes on college students. They have continued to build on this database and then, when a kid is behind on their payments--they sic a commercial arm breaker on them and the debt collector uses the aforementioned database to find the former student and get them to pay.
It is now becoming apparent that this huge database, containing personal information including Social Security Numbers, of almost every American student, has been used as the personal well-stocked fishing ground of Direct Marketers. Theresa S. Shaw, COO of the Office of Federal Student Aid, which manages the database, recently admitted at a conference that the data mining is out of control.
This is the law of Unintended Consequences in action--If you build a sufficiently comprehensive database, it will be used in the future for any purpose that makes sense at the time, regardless of the intentions of the originator.
This rule should be part of the discussion on funding for any government-sponsored database project. It is not enough to assure the public that a database will be protected. As long as there are no tangible sanctions in place for abusing personal data, databases will be exploited.
Posted on April 15, 2007
