Senate urged to stop spooks data-mining

US FEDERAL LAWS protecting privacy have fallen behind the technology used by government spooks to spy on citizens, a Senate hearing was told.

Leslie Harris, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Privacy Act and other laws needed a make-over to deal with the Digital Age.

According to Associated Press, she was concerned about how government departments were mining data to compile secret dossiers for clues to the identity of terrorists or criminals.

The hearing is the first since the Democrats retook control of the Senate and is the beginning of a series on privacy-related debates. The Democrats are planning a Federal Data Mining Reporting Act which requires federal agencies to regularly inform Congress about their use of data mining. µ