[Infowarrior] - Senate Bill Would Mandate Disclosure of Data Mining

[Richard Forno]

Senate Bill Would Mandate Disclosure of Data Mining

By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 21, 2007; D03

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/20/AR2007032001
604_pf.html

The Justice Department is opposing bipartisan Senate legislation that would
require federal agencies to disclose to Congress data-mining programs they
use to find patterns of criminal or terrorist activity, saying that it
duplicates a reporting requirement mandated in the 2006 renewal of the USA
Patriot Act.

The department, however, missed the March 9 deadline to report on its
data-mining programs as required by the law. Senate Democrats, who have
pressed for disclosure to ensure that privacy and civil liberties were not
violated, are not pleased.

"This is more stonewalling by the administration to avoid congressional
oversight," said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick J. Leahy
(D-Vt.), who co-sponsored the data-mining provision with Sens. Russell
Feingold (D-Wis.) and John E. Sununu (R-N.H.). "We specifically placed
sunshine provisions in the Patriot Act reauthorization to ensure some
reasonable checks on the department's data-mining activities that affect
millions of Americans," Leahy said.

The 2006 Patriot Act mandated a one-time report on Justice data-mining
initiatives. The Senate proposal would establish a yearly reporting
requirement for all federal agencies.

A Justice Department inspector general's report revealed recently that the
FBI improperly gathered telephone and financial records of U.S. residents
using administrative subpoenas called national security letters, and in some
cases merely by citing "exigent circumstances." The report, released two
weeks ago, was mandated in the reauthorized Patriot Act over the Bush
administration's objections. The report also found that the FBI
"significantly understated" to Congress the number of national security
letters it had issued.

In January, Leahy asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales whether the
Justice Department would produce a report on its data-mining activities. He
received no reply.

But Friday, with the department trying to contain fallout from the inspector
general's report and a controversy over its firing of eight U.S. attorneys,
Richard A. Hertling, the acting assistant attorney general, wrote Leahy that
the department was "working diligently" to complete the report and send it
to Congress "as expeditiously as possible."

In a Feb. 28 letter to Leahy, Hertling said the legislation is "largely
duplicative" of the Patriot Act requirement and that its scope is
"potentially quite broad" and "might be read to include a wide range of
normal, everyday investigative techniques."

Hertling said the Department of Homeland Security "has many of these same
concerns."

The Senate passed the data-mining measure last week as part of a Homeland
Security bill. There is no similar provision in the House version of the
larger bill and differences between the two bills will have to be resolved
in a conference committee.

Jim Harper, director of information policy at the Cato Institute, a
libertarian think tank, said that the administration's opposition to
reporting on data-mining programs appears to reflect on one hand "simple,
bureaucratic intransigence . . . less oversight is better for a
bureaucracy." On the other, he said, in light of the inspector general's
report, Justice Department officials might fear that data-mining oversight
"would reveal a great deal more that offends privacy."

The Justice Department "appreciates the importance of congressional
oversight on these critical matters," said Dean Boyd, a spokesman.