Briefs

cnet, by Stephanie Condon, December 3, 2008.

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.

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