With the furor swirling around the report revealing the National Security Agency’s gathering of domestic phone records, Voice of America correspondent Gary Thomas interviewed UT computer science professor Dr. Michael W. Berry during a VOA broadcast on May 11, 2006. Dr. Berry, a nationally recognized expert on data mining and the interim head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Tennessee, said the volume of information available in the digital age is enormous, and care must be taken how it is used.
“Now this is more of a digital age, and so that everything we do and interact with is societal and ultimately can be captured in some digital form,” said Berry. “The question is, what do you do with it? Is it something that should be exploited for creating new technologies and better products? Or is it a way of monitoring people?”
The interview, which includes comments from other experts as well, can be accessed in either print or audio formats at:
http://www.voanews.com/english/archive/2006-05/2006-05-11-voa67.cfm.