ADVISE

ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement) is a research and development program within the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Threat and Vulnerability Testing and Assessment (TVTA) portfolio. It is reportedly developing a massive data mining system, which would collect and analyze data on everyone in the United States and perform a "threat analysis" on them. The data can be anything from financial records, phone records, emails, blog entries, website searches, to any other electronic information that can be put into a computer system. This information is then analyzed, and used to monitor social threats such as community-forming, terrorism, political organizing, or crime. ADVISE will possess the ability to store one quadrillion data entities. The exact scope and degree of completion of the program is unclear. ADVISE is in the 2004-2006 Federal DHS Budget as a component of the $47 million TVTA program. The program was officially scrapped in September 2007 after the agency's internal Inspector General found that pilot testing of the system had been performed using data on real people without required privacy safeguards in place.