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Washington -- 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 Department of Defense should safeguard the privacy of U.S. persons when using data mining to fight terrorism," the panel says in a report to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The report says privacy laws lag far behind advances in information and communications technology.

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 and databases of financial, medical and travel information.

The Pentagon program, later renamed Terrorism Information Awareness, was flawed from the start, though its goal was worthwhile, the panel said.

"Our nation should use information technology and the power to search digital data to fight terrorism, but should protect privacy while doing so," it concluded. "In developing and using data mining tools, the government can and must protect privacy."

Data mining is defined as searches of one or more electronic databases of information concerning U.S. persons, by or on behalf of an agency or employee of the government.

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Hear also NPR audio (May 18).