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Some believe that the FBI has these phenomenal capabilities to access any information at any time - that we can get what we want, when we want it, by flipping some sort of switch. It may be true in the movies or on TV. It is simply not the case in real life.

Access to the security clearance database would disgorge even more detailed personal information, including the foreign contacts of American officials.

The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife's phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.

The fact is that proprietary databases don't work for such basic and broadly needed information as the sequence of the human genome.

Whatever the device you use for getting your information out, it should be the same information.

Now we have a whole separate supplier of data for Able Danger who's verifying that same information.

Technologies like Ayasdi's exist now to automatically discover information from data without having someone making guesses up front.

That is really not much different from the search engines that are being constructed today for users throughout the entire world to allow them to search through databases to access the information that they require.

Uncontrolled access to data, with no audit trail of activity and no oversight would be going too far. This applies to both commercial and government use of data about people.