Panel: Government data-mining programs lack oversight | Politics and Law - CNET News

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Americans leave behind countless digital footprints from everyday activities like making a phone call or using a credit card--footprints government agencies regularly track as part of their counterterrorism efforts.

The collection, retention, and dissemination of this information has dangerously escaped public oversight and congressional scrutiny, public sector experts warned Congress on Wednesday. If the next Congress and administration do not take steps to rein in these programs that are bloating the federal government, they said, it will come at the expense of both civil liberties and national security.

Policy experts laid out their concerns to the House Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday, which hosted a series of roundtable discussions on privacy and civil liberties. Too many loopholes exist in the Privacy Act, government data mining programs are ineffective, and information-sharing programs are growing without any accountability, they said.

"The truth is, we cannot do everything, so we have to set priorities that maintain the values of a free society," said Laura Murphy, president of Laura Murphy & Associates.

It is well founded that the government runs data-mining programs through which they monitor some people's activities in search of unusual information that may indicate terrorist activity is at work. However, there is "massive overclassification" of such national security programs, said Michael German, national security policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Homeland Security Committee should take more steps to hold data-mining programs publicly accountable, panelists said, particularly predictive data-mining programs, which aim to predict terrorist activity based on previously established patterns.

The federal government has been too secretive about predictive data mining, said Fred Cate, director of the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University, because "the lesson from the (Total Information Awareness) debacle is just don't say what you're doing, and you won't get the pushback."

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