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WASHINGTON--The government's capacity to mine public and private databases for information on citizens has hit the brakes, by vote of the U.S. Senate.

The Senate vote halts funding and deployment of the Total Information Awareness program, a Department of Defense endeavor passed when Congress created the Department of Homeland Security. It passed unanimously Thursday as an amendment to an omnibus spending bill.

Digital Detectives

The Total Information Awareness program seeks to dig personal data from a virtually bottomless pit of information, including commercial databases of medical, financial, and employment records. It would also establish the electronic means to cross-check, filter, and file the exhumed data.

"As originally proposed, the Total Information Awareness program is the most far-reaching government surveillance plan in history," said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, who introduced the amendment. "The Senate has now said that...there will be checks on the government's ability to snoop on law-abiding Americans."

Wyden's amendment is part of a growing outcry on Capitol Hill from lawmakers who say data mining threatens to tread on privacy rights.

"We need to strike a balance between targeting terrorists with everything we've got and also protecting the rights and freedoms cherished by Americans," Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowan Republican, said. This week Grassley requested information on the program in a personal letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft.

If passed into law, the legislation would freeze funding for research and development of the data-mining program until the Defense Department gives Congress a report detailing its likelihood of stopping terrorism and its impact on the privacy of American citizens. The program could continue if President Bush says the freeze would endanger national security.

Government agencies would still be able scour databases for information on people in the United States and abroad who are not U.S. citizens.

The legislation's fate will be decided by a conference between House and Senate members. If passed into law, the funding freeze on the Total Information Awareness program would begin 60 days later.

Valuable Patterns

Raghu Ramakrishnan, a professor of computer science at the University of Wisconsin and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, says the government project's major aim is to cross-reference and collate data that the government already has access to.

"Being able to say that something is a significant pattern instead of some coincidence--getting to that point--that's the challenge," Ramakrishnan says. "To be able to do this, you need information at a level that could quickly begin to be intrusive."

Ramakrishnan likens data mining to authorities entering a citizen's home, an action that currently requires enough probable cause to obtain a warrant.

"[Authorities] are starting to have to think more carefully about the exact same issues only in terms of the electronic versions of our lives," Ramakrishnan says.

Privacy issues aside, most lawmakers and lobbyists agree data-mining has its merits. Proponents of the Total Information Awareness program point out it that helps detect suspicious patterns of behavior, such as a number of individuals in different locations buying plane tickets with a single credit card--as the September 11 hijackers did.

"It's basically just a more efficient and practical means to get information the government can already get," says Michael Scardaville, a policy analyst for homeland security at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. "This system could be used in a way that could actually increase the protection of personal information by eliminating the delivery of information on innocent individuals to the government agencies utilizing the technology."