Senator calls for reports on government data searches

IDG News Service - Civil liberties groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), are throwing their support behind a piece of legislation that would require U.S. agencies to report to Congress about the personal information they collect.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) introduced the Citizens' Protection in Federal Databases Act of 2003 on July 29. The bill would require federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies to disclose when they subscribe to commercial databases of personal information.
Wyden's legislation would require reports from U.S. agencies, including the FBI and the departments of Justice, Homeland Security and Defense. The reports would have to disclose agency contracts to obtain commercial data, how the agencies analyze the data and the privacy guidelines used by the agencies.
The bill also prohibits all federal agencies from conducting searches of commercial data to create hypothetical scenarios of future terrorist attacks.
Wyden argued that no comprehensive privacy laws now exist that regulate the federal government's access to or use of public or private databases. "This legislation would hold the government accountable to Congress and the American people when federal agencies seek to dig through an American's most personal information," he said in a statement.
Representatives of the U.S. Department of Justice and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), home of the much-criticized Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) research project, didn't respond to requests for comments on Wyden's bill.
In January, Wyden introduced an amendment blocking funding for TIA until it could be reviewed by Congress. In mid-July, the U.S. Senate voted to block funding for TIA. One of the goals of TIA, according to DARPA, is to create hypothetical scenarios as a way to pinpoint possible terrorist activities.
Wyden expects support in the Senate for his legislation, said a spokeswoman. "It's clear that Sen. Wyden's colleagues share his concerns about some of TIA's initiatives," she said.
Both the CDT and the EFF issued statements backing Wyden's bill. The legislation is a first step in recognizing that new laws are needed to protect privacy, the Washington-based CDT said, because "serious privacy concerns" arise when law enforcement and intelligence organizations use data originally collected for commercial reasons.
"Some government officials have suggested that terrorists could be found by dreaming up scenarios and trolling vast databases looking for suspicious conduct," CDT President Jerry Berman said in a statement. "The bill says that is just too risky and too speculative. There should be some particular suspicion, some basis in fact, before agencies search these commercial databases."
The San Francisco-based EFF said the Wyden bill will help ensure that the U.S. government has appropriate guidelines for gathering data. "We need to make sure the emphasis is in place so that [law enforcement agencies] can test data but they're not just using people private information without them knowing about it," said Lisa Dean, the EFF's policy liaison in Washington.