You can trust us. Really

It sounds like the federal securi-crats tripped over their own assurances to the public about the safeguards inherent in the government's data-mining schemes:

The Homeland Security Department scrapped an ambitious anti-terrorism data-mining tool after investigators found it was tested with information about real people without required privacy safeguards. ...

Pilot tests of the program were quietly suspended in March after Congress' Government Accountability Office warned that "the ADVISE tool could misidentify or erroneously associate an individual with undesirable activity such as fraud, crime or terrorism."

Since then, Homeland Security's inspector general and the DHS privacy office discovered that tests used live data about real people rather than made-up data for one to two years without meeting privacy requirements. The inspector general also said ADVISE was poorly planned, time-consuming for analysts to use and lacked adequate justifications.

But it's just an isolated screw-up, you say. The potential benefits of such an intelligence program certainly off-set the chance of the occasional error.

Ah, but were it so.

This is the second such error at DHS.

The Secure Flight program to screen domestic air travelers was blocked by Congress after it acquired live personal data for testing. That program has since issued a privacy impact assessment, dropped use of commercial data such as personal credit card histories, and will begin tests this fall.

In fact, federal officials seem overwhelmingly prone to give rather cavalier treatment to sensitive data about individuals and businesses. At least these abuses came during the test phase of these data-gathering operations, at a time when they're likely to be subject to much more scrutiny than they would be during routine operation, and when they have access to less information than they would when in their full glory.

These programs are also more vulnerable now. How likely is it that the feds would shut down data-mining operations once they've become an established part of the bureaucracy--even in the face of a much larger scandal about the abuse of information?

let's just take this as a warning about what the government should not be allowed to do.