July 26, 2005 – A single sentence tacked onto last Thursday’s US House of Representatives bill to reauthorize the USA Patriot Act has the Bush administration putting pressure on fellow Republican lawmakers to shield the Justice Department from disclosing data-mining efforts. The New York Times reports that the White House and allies are demanding lawmakers remove the language from the measure before it even makes it into the joint negotiating committee with Senate leaders.
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At issue is an amendment that requires the Department of Justice to report to Congress on government efforts to collect and store personal information about Americans. The proposal was offered by Representative Howard L. Berman (D-California).
Government data-mining efforts have come under fire from the right and left. In a position paper last fall, Jim Harper, director of information policy studies with the libertarian Cato Institute criticized as bad policy Bush administration efforts to create data-mining programs.
And earlier this year, the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, noted that private databases can be used as an end-run around existing laws that restrict the federal government’s ability to indiscriminately plumb for personal information.
"Because of ambiguities in the law, government has decided not to apply privacy protections to commercial databases," the May statement said. "While a federal agency must conduct a Privacy Impact Assessment if it compiles a new database, it can subscribe to personal data assembled by private companies without considering the privacy implications."
The House passed the Patriot Act extension with the amendment intact, but not before Congressional Republicans received a set of unsigned talking points stating that Berman’s measure would be "burdensome, costly and of little value," and that it "could interfere with the daily law enforcement activities," the Times reported Saturday.
