Flutterby™! : trust the government

By now you've undoubtedly seen the news that the CIA has released two sets of previously classified historical documents that detail a few of the illegal operations that the CIA has participated in. Here's the CIA's "Family Jewels" at the National Security Archives (should also be available over at foia.ia.gov). So why link to it now? Mark V has a link to Bruce Schneier on data reuse, in which he points out that the Census Bureau used individual data to round up Japanese-Americans during World War II.

... Data that is never collected cannot be reused. Data that is collected anonymously, or deleted immediately after it is used, is much harder to reuse. It's easy to build systems that collect data on everything -- it's what computers naturally do -- but it's far better to take the time to understand what data is needed and why, and only collect that.

(alt link to the article) and I thought that the two together was much more interesting than each on its own.