Legal Implications of Data Mining: Assessing the European Union's Data Protection Principles in Light of the United States Government's National Intelligence Data Mining Practices

Abstract

The world has changed dramatically in recent decades. Private documents are no longer stored in basement cabinets within identifiable locations but rather they are housed in unknown data centers around the word. International communication has become easier, cheaper and more prevalent than ever before because of ongoing advances in information communication technologies. More and more of people’s lives are lived online where the details of their private existences – where they travel, what they eat, who they communicate with most frequently, what they read and write, how much they exercise, how much they sleep, what government services they utilize and so on – can be tracked with relative ease. Because of the structure of the Internet, not only do these data travel through a variety of different countries en route to their final destination but they may also be accessed from places very distant from where the communication was initially generated.