First, from The Hill:

This week, without much fanfare, the House is expected to approve a bill mandating that the Treasury Department create a real-time electronic database of information related to the bailout. And for data warehousing and analysis firms, the bill could lead to a hefty contract. At a September hearing, Stephen Horne, vice president at Dow Jones, testified that it could cost $50 million to create and run a database for the first year . . .

“We can track where any UPS package is at any time of day,” [Rep. Carolyn] Maloney told The Hill this week. “Why in the world can’t we track this information?”. . .

Dow Jones & Co., IBM and SAS Institute have all lobbied on the bill, according to congressional records. Teradata, an Ohio-based data analytics and warehousing firm, has been a prominent supporter of the bill.

Then, from Wired:

The federal court system charged the Department of Justice more than $4 million in 2009 for access to its electronic court filing system, which is composed entirely of documents in the public domain. . .

The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts runs the search system known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or PACER. PACER charges citizens, journalists, corporate lawyers and even the Attorney General $.08 per page to look at court filings in U.S. District Courts. The system pulled in nearly $50 million in 2006. The contract between the PACER office and the Justice Department began in 2002 with a charge of $800,000, which quickly rose to more than $4.2 million in 2009.

Wired also notes that the Justice Department had to sign a $5 million contract in 2005 with West Publishing to gain online access to court records since the U.S. Court system does not make their records available for bulk download:

West, and its competitor, Lexis Nexis, buy court data in bulk, reformat it and add proprietary citation codes. They then license the database of public documents at high rates to libraries, law firms and government agencies. Even the U.S. Court system pays West’s high license fees to access public court documents that West purchased from it.

[UPDATE 12.08.09: Yahoo's "spy guide" and price list for user information published by Cryptome]

John Young has obtained and published documents on his website that details some of the digital surveillance policies of Yahoo, Verizon, AT$T, SBC, COX, and Sprint — among others. Most interesting, however, is Young’s publication of Yahoo’s Compliance Guide for Law Enforcement that describes the kinds of user information available to law enforcement and how much the company will charge the government for such information. While this ‘price list’ more or less confirms what a lot of people have suspected — that the border between big-business and big-government surveillance is a porous one — Yahoo’s reaction to its publication is truly revealing. Yahoo has issued a DMCA takedown notice to Cryptome, demanding the document be removed and arguing that its publication is (somehow) an act of copyright infringement.

Further, as Wired reported back on 12/01/09 before Cryptome published Yahoo’s Compliance Guide for Law Enforcement, Yahoo had been trying to prevent a FOIA request seeking information on how much Yahoo (among others) charge the government for user information. Yahoo opposed the FOIA request by claiming it would both “shock” and “confuse” their customers.

So what might a “Typical Semantic Graph” for a young person of interest look like? Part work, part play – here is GAO’s “typical semantic graph for a person of interest” compared to my “typical semantic graph for a young person of interest”:

The Government Accountability Office maintains an office at the National Security Agency but it remains unused since no one in Congress has asked GAO to perform any oversight of the Agency, the head of GAO disclosed last week.

Despite multi-billion dollar acquisition failures at NSA and the Agency’s controversial, possibly illegal surveillance practices, Congress has declined to summon all of its oversight resources such as GAO to address such issues…

… “We still actually do have space at the NSA. We just don’t use it and the reason we don’t use it is we’re not getting any requests, you know. So I don’t want to have people sitting out there twiddling their thumbs,” Mr. Walker said.