The United States is not, of course, the only country in the world to use data mining and link analysis programs. Nor are we the only country to have struggled with the need to judge the tradeoffs between systems that enhance security and uses that might erode the personal privacy of citizens. Perhaps a better perspective on the American experience can be gained by looking at the same questions as they are addressed in other countries. And, of course, given the world-wide span of the internet, the citizens and press of other countries may find useful resource here for their own domestic use.
In these pages, we briefly outline some of the programs at issue and principles that are applied to data mining in the United Kingdom, the European Union, Mexico, India, Brazil, Singapore and China.