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Wednesday, May 19, 2004

Warrants for Federal Data-Mining (It’s Democracy, Stupid)

[New York Times, via EFF] “A federal advisory committee says Congress should pass laws to protect the civil liberties of Americans when the government sifts through computer records and data files for information about terrorists.

“The eight-member panel, which includes former officials with decades of high-level government experience, found that the Defense Department and many other agencies were collecting and using "personally identifiable information on U.S. persons for national security and law enforcement purposes." Some of these activities, it said, resemble the Pentagon program initially known as Total Information Awareness, which was intended to catch terrorists before they struck, by monitoring e-mail messages and databases of financial, medical and travel information....”

“One of the panel's most important recommendations is to involve the courts in deciding when the government can search electronic databases.

“In general, it said, the Defense Department and other federal agencies should be required to obtain approval from a special federal court ‘before engaging in data mining with personally identifiable information concerning U.S. persons.’" Ya think?

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