Privacy at risk

Monday, June 23, 2008 | 2:06 a.m.

Federal auditors say government agencies that collect, share and store personal information about millions of people do not have adequate procedures for protecting that information from outsiders.

In a report released last week the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said the nation’s aging privacy laws have not been significantly altered to reflect “increasingly sophisticated” information technology applications.

In testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, the GAO’s Linda Koontz said that “in today’s highly interconnected environment, information can be gathered from many different sources, analyzed and redistributed in very dynamic, unstructured ways.”

For example, the GAO says, current laws impose minimal requirements when it comes to ensuring that the collection and use of personal information is limited to a specified purpose, opening the door to ambiguous searches that can unwittingly leave people open to risk of identity theft, unwarranted surveillance or other abuses.

Caroline Fredrickson, of the American Civil Liberties Union, told USA Today that the federal 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.”

Lawmakers and federal officials should heed all of the GAO‘s recommendations, which call on Congress to update the 1974 privacy law and find ways to ensure that privacy protections are applied diligently and consistently to all federal collections and uses of personal information. Such data also should be collected and used only for specific purposes, and the public should be informed about what privacy protections exist.

It is astonishing that, with all of the discussion and debate about data collection and privacy concerns in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, government agencies haven’t adequately safeguarded the massive amounts of personal data they are collecting and sharing with one another. Such steps are long overdue.