Privacy advocates: Congress must police data gathering

WASHINGTON - Assurances of limited scope from the leaders of two proposed U.S. government data-gathering projects weren't good enough for privacy advocates, who on Tuesday urged Congress to police just what personal information the government should analyze.

Earlier this month, leaders of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Total Information Awareness (TIA) data-mining research project, now renamed Terrorism Information Awareness, and the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-screening System (CAPPS II) told a U.S. House subcommittee that their projects wouldn't collect the wealth of information some privacy advocates fear they would.

An American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) official expressed fears Tuesday that both programs would be expanded to collect information on all kinds of people besides terrorist suspects, but Representative Adam Putnam, a Florida Republican, questioned whether that possibility was such a bad thing. Putnam is chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform's Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and the Census.

John Cohen, president and chief executive officer of PSComm LLC, a technology consultant for law enforcement agencies, questioned the need for TIA and CAPPS II when U.S. agencies have trouble sharing the data they currently have. Cohen suggested, instead, that the government direct more money toward information sharing among state and local law agencies, where investigations into crimes such as drug trafficking often turn up the first leads on terrorist activity.

Putnam seized upon Cohen's point when questioning whether CAPPS II should be limited to catching terrorists. "Why would we restrict the ability of TSA and others, using best technology practices, to pick up a sniper, a weapons trafficker, a drug trafficker, a murder or a kidnapper?" he said. "How would we justify to the parents of a kidnapped child that we had the technology, and could've picked that person up at the airport, but we only do that for terrorists?"

The ACLU's Barry Steinhardt complained to Putnam's subcommittee of the "surveillance monster" growing in U.S. society. "We find ourselves being tracked, analyzed, profiled and flagged in our daily lives," said Steinhardt, director of the Technology and Liberty Program at the ACLU. "(We're) forced into an impossible struggle to conform to the letter of every rule or law society could impose. Our transgressions, whether they be real or imagined ... become permanent scarlet letters that follow us our whole lives."

Steinhardt suggested that neither DARPA or TSA has shown evidence that their data-gathering projects will be able to find terrorists by plugging a list of suspect activities into a database. But the ACLU was not opposed effective security measures, such as a way to match luggage loaded on an airplane to the passengers.

"What we do oppose are measures that offer nothing but the illusion of security -- programs that make us no safer but carry a substantial price in lost freedom," Steinhardt said. "Will we really be able to pick out the terrorists from the 100 million Americans who fly?"

On the same day a report on TIA was released to Congress, Steinhardt told the subcommittee that the public and Congress still know few details about either TIA or CAPPS II.