- The Senate could pass a bill as early as Wednesday evening
that would let government counter-terrorist investigators instantly query
a massive system of interconnected commercial and government databases
that hold billions of records on Americans.
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- The proposed network is based on the Markle Foundation
Task Force's December 2003 report, which envisioned a system that would
allow FBI and CIA agents, as well as police officers and some companies,
to quickly search intelligence, criminal and commercial databases. The
proposal is so radical, the bill allocates $50 million just to fund the
system's specifications and privacy policies.
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- The Senate will likely have its final vote on the bill,
sponsored by Joseph Lieberman (D-Connecticut) and Susan Collins (R-Maine),
Wednesday night. The draft of the bill was based on recommendations of
the so-called 9/11 Commission, which investigated the United States' lapse
in intelligence and security procedures prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
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- To prevent abuses of the system, the Markle task force
recommended anonymized technology, graduated levels of permission-based
access and automated auditing software constantly hunting for abuses.
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- An appendix to the report went so far as to suggest that
the system should "identify known associates of the terrorist suspect,
within 30 seconds, using shared addressees, records of phone calls to and
from the suspect's phone, e-mails to and from the suspect's accounts, financial
transactions, travel history and reservations, and common memberships in
organizations, including (with appropriate safeguards) religious and expressive
organizations."
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- But task force member James X. Dempsey, director of the
Center for Democracy & Technology, says the commercial records involved
are more limited public records, such as home ownership data, not information
about what mosque someone belongs to.
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- He said he believes it's "absurd" to prohibit
the FBI from using a commercial database like ChoicePoint to find a suspected
terrorist's home address (though the FBI currently can and does do this).
On the other hand, he asked, "Should they be able to go to ChoicePoint
and ask for all the subscribers to Gun Owners Monthly? No, I don't think
so."
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- The proposed network would not look for patterns in data
warehouses to attempt to detect terrorist activities, Dempsey said. Instead,
an investigator would start with a name and the system would try to see
what information is known about that person.
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- But critics say the Senate is moving too fast and the
network could infringe on civil liberties. Lawmakers are taking a "boil
the ocean" approach, according to Robert Griffin, president of Knowledge
Computing. His company runs Coplink, a widely used system for linking law
enforcement databases. Despite being a supporter of increased information
sharing, Griffin criticized the proposal for trying too much too soon and
relying too heavily on commercial data.
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- "The next Mohammed Atta is not going to be found
in commercial databases," Griffin said, referring to the tactical
leader of the 9/11 attacks. "We are going to stop him running a red
light somewhere, and we are going to run relationships associations with
this guy and we are going to say, gee, you have things in common with guys
on watch lists. That's how you are going to find the guy -- not because
he has bad credit."
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- Civil liberties lawyer Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation accused Congress of "institutional laziness" for not
holding hearings on the proposal to hear the perspectives of advocates
for consumers or battered women. Tien also argued that a widespread lack
of privacy and due process protections would make data sharing dangerous.
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- "If someone transfers your credit report or medical
history, you have no way of knowing," Tien said. "The natural
feedback we expect in the physical world just doesn't work in the area
of information. You have to be careful."
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- Tien is not alone in his concern. On Monday, more than
40 organizations, ranging from the American Association of Law Libraries
to the NAACP, signed on to an open letter (.pdf) to Congress asking members
to include adequate civil liberties safeguards in the pending legislation.
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- However, technology professor Dave Farber said that his
work on the task force convinced him the task force's model was a "critical"
tool in the fight against terrorists.
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- "A lot of (task force members) were very uncomfortable
about data sharing," Farber said. "But all of us at the end felt
confident that if the recommendations were followed, it was as good as
it was going to get relative to privacy protections."
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