Privacy Advocate Criticizes Govt Data Mining

The government's ability to use computers to gather personal information about citizens and act on it has far outstripped the federal laws designed to protect them from secret federal dossiers, a privacy advocate says.

Leslie Harris, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, wants the Senate Judiciary Committee to update the Privacy Act and other laws to keep pace with the digital age.

She was among a handful of think-tank scholars and privacy advocates called to testify Wednesday at the panel's first hearing since Democrats retook control of the Senate. The topic was balancing privacy with security in government data-mining - the computerized searching of large banks of information for clues to the identity of terrorists or criminals.

Judiciary Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said last month that Congress knows too little about how the Bush administration is using data-mining tools and "that is going to change in the new Congress."

While acknowledging terrorism is a threat, Harris planned to tell the committee: "Especially in the counterterrorism context, a major shift in the data collection and use landscape is taking place without a suitable privacy and due process framework."

A copy of her prepared remarks was obtained by The Associated Press.

"The government is accessing entire buckets of data without a warrant" and without specific suspicion of particular individuals, Harris said in those remarks.

An individual mistakenly designated as a possible terrorist or associate of terrorists can face "arrest, deportation, loss of a job, more intrusive investigation, discrimination, damage to reputation and a lifetime of suspicion, with little or no opportunity for redress or correction of errors," Harris said.

She said the impact of technological innovations combined with new government powers enacted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and outdated legal protections was illustrated by the Customs and Border Protection agency's "Automated Targeting System."

The Associated Press disclosed last month that the system had been developing risk assessments of millions of Americans over the last four years without their knowledge. The AP also reported those assessments of people who traveled aboard were to be kept for 40 years and could be shared with state, local and foreign governments and even some private contractors.

Under existing law, "a risk score developed for border screening purposes could easily migrate to other uses (years after the citizen was determined not to be a threat)," Harris said.

Customs officials say the program is legal and essential to keeping terrorists out of the country. Leahy said last month on C-Span's "Newsmakers" program he thought it violated a congressional ban using on data-mining tools to assign risk to passengers not on watch lists.

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