The Government Accountability Office (GAO) says that new laws are needed to safeguard people’s personal information. Decades-old laws no longer cover the “increasingly sophisticated ways” that the government collects information, such as through biometric scans of fingerprints, the report said.
“In today’s highly interconnected environment, information can be gathered from many different sources, analyzed and redistributed in very dynamic, unstructured ways,” the GAO’s Linda Koontz says in testimony prepared for a hearing today by the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
Much of the way personal information is handled today, including being sifted through data-mining systems that search for patterns, is not covered by the Privacy Act of 1974, she says.
As states begin collecting information in coming years to produce new secure drivers’ licenses, government databases will get even larger. “The government has no business collecting our personal information if it cannot ensure the American public it will be protected from identity thieves and other prying eyes,” says Caroline Fredrickson of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Committee Chairman Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., says citizens can be left vulnerable to identity theft, stalking, discrimination, unwarranted surveillance or loss of employment if their personal information isn’t properly secured. “It is essential for the government to collect and use personal information,” he says. But the government must “properly balance our many policy goals against potential incursions on privacy.”
The GAO report suggests that Congress update the Privacy Act to reflect the changing times and technologies.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, agrees: “In the digital age … we must be even more vigilant to ensure that rapid technological change does not undermine the privacy rights that Americans treasure.”
Bruce Schneier, chief security technology officer at the British telecommunications company BT, says it will be difficult for Congress to pass a law that could really protect the vast amounts of information the government holds.
The underlying problem, he says, is that “massive, massive data collections” are kept by private industry and the government, a proliferation of data he calls the “pollution problem of the information age.” He says that it’s difficult to safeguard it all.
