Bad Data!

As our country's lawmakers and citizens debate the proposed Immigration Reform bill, I found an related article in the 28 May 2007 issue of eWeek entitled, "Privacy concerns stem from bill." The full title of the bill is "The Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007" and one of the provisions that ought to concern IT people is the proposed expansion of the Employment Eligibility Verification System (EEVS). Basically, it would require all American workers to be registered in a Department of Homeland Security database, be checked against it to get a job, and also fine businesses that don't comply. The problem is, the government doesn't have a good track record for operating and protecting large databases like this - just think about the problems with the "No Fly List" database and recent data breaches. Here's my favorite quote from the article:

"The government definitely seems to have two consistent problems — one is bad data getting into the database ... and the other is getting bad data out of the database," said John Pescatore, an analyst for Gartner.

I usually take anything a Gartner analyst says with a large grain of salt, but in this case, he's right on the money. As a government employee who's run large database programs for a living, I can tell you: It's going to be a disaster.

J.A.W.