Briefs

National Law Journal (05/26/03); Coyle, Marcia

The Pentagon issued a report last week detailing its Terrorist Information Awareness (TIA) program, in which numerous databases about citizens' personal transactions would be mined to find indications of terrorist activity. The point of the report was to establish whether the initiative strikes a balance between national security and privacy laws, but both critics and supporters of TIA agree that the report should spur debate among legislators and the public over how current privacy laws should be revamped.

Center for Democracy and Technology attorney Lara Flint says the report is a "first step in what could be a long process of discussing the implications of a program like this, what laws apply--which we think are few--and what the new rules need to be." TIA and other programs highlight three fundamental flaws with privacy statutes, according to Peter Shire of Ohio State University. First of all, such programs authorize searches through private databases that are not protected by the Privacy Act of 1974, which covers "systems of records;" second, the Fourth Amendment, which requires federal authorities to secure a warrant before conducting searches, does not apply to outside organizations with databases of individuals' personal information, which can be accessed under Supreme Court jurisdiction; and third, the government can leverage exceptions to existing privacy laws to get hold of data. "The whole point of TIA is to send searches through the largest possible array of private-sector databases, where...there is no Privacy Act protection and no Fourth Amendment protection," Shire declares. Paul Rosenzweig of the Heritage Foundation thinks Congress and the Pentagon can limit the application of TIA, while Flint notes that the Pentagon's TIA report does not settle a basic issue--whether the program will actually work.

http://www.nlj.com/news/052603information.shtml