Bills: Down With Citizen Database 

Bills, not words, define the latest criticism of the U.S. government's controversial Total Information Awareness program.

Seeking to catch terrorists before they strike, the research program aims to develop data-mining and pattern-matching tools to search databases that track American citizens' purchases, doctor's visits and travel itineraries. It is the signature project of the Information Awareness Office, which operates under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, commonly known as DARPA.

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On Tuesday, a broad coalition of public interest groups, ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union to the American Conservative Union, urged Congress to scrap the surveillance program.

Just three days earlier, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee asked Attorney General John Ashcroft for detailed information on the project.

Now, lawmakers have introduced three separate bills banning or suspending the program.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) proposed an amendment on Wednesday to the Omnibus Appropriations Bill that would suspend the program's $112 million budget for 2003.

On Thursday, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) introduced the Data Mining Moratorium Act of 2003, which "suspends data-mining programs until Congress finishes a complete and total review," according to Feingold spokesman Ari Geller.

But the first lawmaker to take a shot at the program was Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), who introduced his bill last week, though few on Capitol Hill noticed. The bill, the Equal Rights and Equal Dignity for Americans Act of 2003, was one of 12 Daschle introduced and currently has 26 co-sponsors.

The act prohibits the Pentagon from "research, development, test or evaluation on any technology whose primary purpose is the collection of information on United States citizens ... for intelligence or law enforcement purposes."

Wyden's amendment requires the attorney general, the secretary of defense and the director of the CIA to submit to Congress a joint report on the program within a month. It also allows the president to override the amendment by submitting a letter to Congress certifying that the program is essential to national security.

While opposition to the program has been bipartisan, no Republican has yet signed on to any of these bills.

Critics blame the secrecy surrounding the Total Information Awareness project for the rush of bills in the new session.

"Sen. Tom Harkin asked for more information in early December, and we got a short note on Christmas Eve, saying 'We'll write more later,'" said Bill Burton, a Harkin spokesman.

Possibly in response to the media spotlight, the Information Awareness Office recently updated its website, removing project leader's biographies and updating infographics to highlight privacy protections.

Most notable, however, was the disappearance of the office's logo, which featured the phrase "Knowledge Is Power" and a one-eyed pyramid gazing onto a globe. (Inquisitive Web surfers can still find the logo in Google's cache.)

Additions to the site include a privacy study (PDF) and an undated document (PDF) addressing media coverage of the project.

The document reads, in part: "Today, the full TIA prototype exists only as a vision.... The Department of Defense recognizes American citizens' concerns about privacy invasions. To ensure the TIA project will not violate the privacy of American citizens, the Department has safeguards in place."

On Thursday, DARPA deferred commenting on the proposed legislation, pending a review.

"However, we continue to believe that the research and development planned under the Total Information Awareness program is important to our nation," said DARPA spokeswoman Jan Walker.

Privacy advocates welcomed the flurry of anti-TIA bills.

"I am pleased to see these bills, even though they are sort of a jumble," said Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "The legislative confusion seems to me a genuine expression of concern from a lot of different politicians and their constituents."

Tien said he favors Feingold's bill because its data-mining limits also apply to programs in the Homeland Security Agency and the Transportation Security Agency, including the TSA's new airline passenger screening system scheduled for release this year.

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More stories written by Ryan Singel