Closing the Data Mines: Repairing Oversight, Preserving Rights

For decades, law enforcement and intelligence have used data mining—the process of extracting patterns from data to inform decision-making—to route resources, attempt to identify suspects, and predict illegal behavior. Those use cases raise significant concerns. 

On November 6, 2025, EPIC published the white paper Closing the Data Mines: Repairing Oversight, Preserving Rights to dive into some of the problems with government data mining. These programs are riddled with opportunities to introduce bad data and human biases and could easily violate our privacy and constitutional rights.  

We have some oversight in place. The Federal Agency Data Mining Reporting Act of 2007 requires agencies to create detailed public reports of their data mining activities that seek patterns indicative of criminal or terrorist activity. But while the Act is an important safeguard, the 18 years since its creation have exposed its weaknesses as a measure for meaningful accountability. As the federal government bowls past privacy protections to access personal information, we need the accountability promised by the Act more than ever.  

In Closing the Data Mines, EPIC lays out what data mining is, its technical limitations, and its implications for privacy and civil rights when used by the government. We examine how federal agencies have (or have not) complied with the Act and recommend ways to repair the Act so that it can provide protective and actionable insight into agency activities.