If passed into law the bill would represent a policy change from
the more secretive Republican Congress, led by President George W
Bush's lead on surveillance. The Bush administration recently
admitted that it broke privacy laws in its airline passenger data
mining programme.
The administration has also become embroiled in a case over the
tapping of phone lines of US citizens. It is fighting a law suit
from citizens and pressure groups over a wire tap programme on
which the suit claims that telco AT&T and the National Security
Agency collaborated. The suit claims that the wire tap programme
was illegal.
A Republican and a Democrat senator have introduced a bill which
would order federal agencies to report on the use of data analysis
techniques to predict criminal or terrorist behaviour. In the past
such bills have failed to pass through Republican Congress.
Democrats Russell Feingold and Daniel Leahy and Republican John
Sununu have reintroduced the Federal Agency Data Mining Report Act,
a bill which failed to receive a floor vote in 2003 and 2005.
The announcement of the bill's revival came in the same week
that the new chairman of the Senate's Judiciary Committee, Democrat
Patrick Leahy, devoted the Committee's first hearing of the new
year to the issue of how to check the executive's snooping
powers.
"Congress is overdue in taking stock of the proliferation of
these databases that increasingly are collecting more information
about each and every American," Leahy told reporters in the US.
Leahy said that the government's terrorist watch list contained
the names of more than 300,000 people, including those of some
members of Congress. He said that 52 federal agencies use data
mining, and that there are 199 data mining programmes planned or in
operation. The NSA, he said, refused to disclose any of its data
mining activities.
"The American people have neither the assurance that these
massive data banks will make us safer, nor the confidence that
their privacy rights will be protected," Leahy told the first
hearing of his committee on the subject.
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