Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold
At the Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on
Balancing Privacy and Security: The Privacy Implications
of Government Data Mining Programs
As Prepared
January 10, 2007
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for holding this hearing. It
raises important policy questions about the capabilities of data mining
technologies, and the privacy and civil liberties implications for ordinary
Americans if this type of technology were to be deployed – questions
that Congress must address. This hearing is a critical first step in
the process of understanding, evaluating, and perhaps regulating this
type of technology.
Many Americans are understandably spooked about the specter of secret
government programs analyzing vast quantities of public and private
data about the everyday pursuits of mostly innocent people, in search
of patterns of suspicious activity. So let me start by reiterating
a point that Senator Wyden and I made in a recent letter to Director
of National Intelligence Negroponte.
Obviously, protecting our national security secrets is essential.
And the Intelligence Community would not be doing its job if it did
not take advantage of new technologies. But when it comes to data
mining, we must be able to have a public discussion – what one
of our witnesses called a “national conversation” –
about its potential efficacy and privacy implications before our government
deploys it domestically. And we can have that public debate about
these policy issues without revealing sensitive information like the
precise algorithms that the government has developed.
The witnesses here today have, for years, been debating a variety
of issues related to data mining. It is time to get Congress and the
executive branch into that discussion, not just in reaction to the
latest news story, but in a proactive, thoughtful and collaborative
way.
As I said before, this hearing is an important first step. I hope
the next step will be enactment of the Federal Data Mining Reporting
Act, which I am reintroducing today along with Senator Sununu, Senator
Leahy, and others. The bill requires federal agencies to report on
their development and use of data mining technologies to discover
predictive or anomalous patterns indicating criminal or terrorist
activity – the types of data analysis that raise the most serious
privacy concerns. It would, of course, allow classified information
to be provided to Congress separately under appropriate security measures.
Along with this hearing, I hope these reports will help Congress
– and to the degree appropriate, the public – finally
understand what is going on behind the closed doors of the executive
branch, so that we can start to have the policy discussion about data
mining that is long overdue. I hope that my colleagues will support
my legislation.
Mr. Chairman, I also want to note that last night I received a response
from Director of National Intelligence Negroponte to the letter Senator
Wyden and I wrote to him, regarding the Tangram data mining program.
In it, the ODNI states that Tangram is a research project and acknowledged
it has “a real risk of failure.” It also assured us that
no Tangram tools would be deployed without consultation with the DNI’s
Civil Liberties and Privacy Officer. I would just add that I would
hope that Congress also would be consulted prior to any deployment
of the Tangram data mining tools.
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