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The government's ability to obtain and analyze recorded information about its citizens through the process known as data mining has expanded enormously over the past decade. Since at least the mid-1990s, the quantity of the world's recorded data has doubled every year. At the same time, the computing power necessary to store, access and analyze these data has increased geometrically, at increasingly cheaper cost. Governments that want to know about their subjects would be foolish not to take advantage of this situation, and federal and state bodies in this country have done so with alacrity. Most academic commentators have called for the abolition of data mining or advocated limitations that are so substantial they would have the same effect. In my view, these commentators exaggerate the dangers of data mining and misperceive its importance as a law enforcement tool; more fundamentally, they take a blunderbuss approach to a highly nuanced problem. A careful look at data mining suggests that many versions of it should not be subject to regulation or only minimally so, while other sorts of data mining ought to be subject to significant constitutionally-based restrictions. In aid of this project, I describe a study that investigated lay views on data mining.